CD:
Reviewer: Maggot
Review:
"Past, present, and future and how the epic death metal band NILE weaves tales from days gone past."
In all my experiences of heavy metal would I ever expect to sit at the table of the mightest of all metal kings, NILE. Blast beat drums, frenzied guitars that act like razor blades slicing through your ear drums, and the switching off and growling perfection of the three vocalists, is the sound behind NILE. Story telling and posessing the power of the ancients from Egypt is another aspect of Nile. Education is an extremely important factor backing NILE, not only in their experiencs but also in their lyrics. "Good education is the salvation of humankind," stated Karl Sanders, guitarist and one of the vocalists of NILE. Myself, personally would not have known much of ancient Egypt, how it tied in with the bible, and some of the most evil vengeful fucking gods of Egypt, if it was not for the colorful and disciplined lyrics of NILE. I am particullarly fond of the new album, "In Their Darkened Shrines," not only because of the perfect mastery of their sound, but also of the way they convey their messages to their audiences. If the lyrics of NILE do not inspire you to grab a book on ancient Egypt, or search stuff out on the internet, then maybe some of the chants to the snake gods will. Nile packs death metal sound into this cd and educates along the way. They have included reasonings and background information for each of their powerful homages to the Egyptians, in the cd. NILE even includes listings of some of the ancient texts where items and ideas were pulled out.
MidWestMetal.Info got a chance to speak to Karl Sanders and we wanted to ask him a few questions of things that we had not seen or may have overlooked in the massive swirling amount of press surrounding these epic Egyptian styled death metalheads. We wanted to know the symbolism behind the cover for "In their darkened shrines." The cover consists of an large ankh and a even more massively sized python drapped over it. Karl stated that "obviuosly the ankh represents eternal life. But this ankh is a decayed relic from the past and the snake is the force that has caused this decay of life. The snake could represent Apophis or Satan or whoever."
We also asked Karl what he sees in the future for NILE, he boldly stated that "we will not change!" MidWestMetal.Info also wanted to know what had happened to Pete Hammoura, former drummer for NILE. Karl mentioned thathe had tore his houlder up. The injury he recieved was "common to people who played baseball." "Pete took some time off from the band and eventually realized that the injury was too much and that he would not be able to play death metal the way he wanted." Pete is currently playing some lighter forms of music and working on his underground metal distribution label, causticproductions.com .
We decided to close out our brief interview with Karl with a quick "odd" question. Either we would get a good answer on this one or be shunned of the tour bus and loose our placement on NILE's guestlist. We hoped the ancients were in our favor, seriously!!!!! We asked Karl, point blankand with no humor in our voice, "what was the deal with the roadie with the festering boil?" We waited a sec and stepped back like we were possibly on the receiving end of a potential ass whooping. Much to our surprise, Karl was dumbfounded and asked where we had heard that. We stated that there was a huge write up in our local newspaper, "Riverfront Times," it was by Katy St. Clair and it was about NILE, this boil, the album, and other stuff you would normally see in a article about a band minus the festering boil. Well apparently the band thought this girl was writing for some small California (i think) underground rag, apparantly that was not the case, since it is here in my hands in the state of Mizery i mean Missouri. Same article and same picture. So much for creativity. Well anyway Karl had mentioned to this girl about this huge festering boil that one of the roadies had on his ass at one point in time. The boil grew extremely huge and ended up blowing nasty stuff all over the tour van, which in turn ended up being sold due to the horrible smell. By time the roadie ended up getting home (i guess off the tour) he had noticed the boil was coming to a head once again, so he went to the doctor. Turns out it was not a boil, but a tail. Apparantly we all have a vestigial nub at the base of our spine. Most people do not sprout tails. Only a few out of a large populous grew this "sort of tail". Interesting stuff here, not egyptian knowledge, but i am still being educated! As we at MidWestMetal.Info like to do, we were able to find the bearer of the tail and were able to verbally verify that this is all a true. Infact from what i gathered the "bearer" may actually give us a first hand write up.
So as you can see, even epic Egyptian styled death metalists NILE seem to have their off color days. But fortunatelly the metal gods are able to forge chaos, life, and even death into something that may even be bigger than them and possibly ancient Egyptian! Long live NILE!!!!
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