Pull the brain out through the nose with a bronze hook. Open the flank, lift the organs into their jars, pack the cavity with salt, wind the linen tight. That is the embalmer's trade, and Those Whom the Gods Detest is the record where Nile work it like master craftsmen instead of grave robbers. Every part goes where it belongs. Nothing rots on the table.
Released by Nuclear Blast in North America on 3 November 2009, with Europe three days behind, recorded across two states because George Kollias took his kit south to Erik Rutan at Mana Recording in Tampa while everything else was cut at Serpent Headed Studios in Greenville, and produced and mixed once more by Neil Kernon, the sixth album from the South Carolina trio arrives two years after Ithyphallic with a correction to make. That record was a club. Fast out of the gate, all sinew, little ritual. The Greenville embalmers put the incense back in the room here and still split the skull open in the opening minutes.
Three men made it. There was no bassist in the band when the tapes rolled, so Dallas Toler-Wade played the low end himself on top of his guitar and his vocals, and Nile were still auditioning bass players in late September, weeks before the release. Karl Sanders built the lyrics around one idea: the gods hate the people who play and listen to metal, and the album answers by rejecting every god at once, no favourites. Guest singers push the chants and melodic lines further into the foreground than on any Nile record before it. That is the big change. It is also the risk.
"Kafir" opens the burial. The word means infidel, and the song starts on a recitation of the Shahada, the Islamic declaration of faith, with recorded prayer laid over it before the band comes in. Then the first riff caves in the coffin lid. The Greenville surgeons do not ease you into the record, they saw straight through the breastbone, and somewhere inside the carnage a male voice sings a line in a scale no Florida death metal textbook ever printed. The groove that follows is the first sign that these men had learned to let a song breathe without letting it go slack.
Now the drums, because that is where I always look first. This is the best production the band had yet put on tape, and nobody gains more from it than Kollias: the kick drums land like a mallet on a mummy case, the blasts come through as separate strokes instead of hiss, and the tom rolls fall where you can count them if your nerve holds. "Hittite Dung Incantation" is the proof in under four minutes. It is the short, straight one, no incense, no detours, the two guitars bolted to the drummer's feet and the whole machine flensing the meat off a riff faster than you can name it.
"Utterances of the Crawling Dead" is a Toler-Wade song, and it has a different job: it grooves. The opening riff is the hook, the mid-tempo weight behind it is heavy enough to dent bronze, and the vocals, here as across the record, come through clean. Nile growls used to arrive as weather. On this album they arrive as sentences, dredged up from the charnel pit with the consonants still on.
Sanders knew exactly what he had changed. "It has hooks, and there's a certain kindness toward the listener," he told Cleveland Scene in an interview published on 13 January 2010. Kindness is a strange word for a band that names a song after Hittite dung. Sanders picked the right one. Kernon's mix lets the fastest picking survive the trip from the amplifier to your ears. A Nile record you can follow is a Nile record you come back to.
A Nile record you can follow is a Nile record you come back to.
The title track and "4th Arra of Dagon" sit back to back in the middle of the record, over eight minutes each, and together they are the summit. "Those Whom the Gods Detest" carries the chorus nobody expected from this band, a near-sung chant disinterred from the burial shaft with the full mass of both guitars behind it, and once it lodges it does not come out. Then comes the limit. "4th Arra of Dagon" is the longer of the pair and the one where the slow ritual passages pile up, and in its middle stretch the record's patience turns into waiting. The incense hangs in the air. Nothing burns. Across the album the slow sections run a little long, and a band this sure of its blade should have trusted it to cut sooner.
Ten tracks on the embalmer's table, the organs sealed in their jars, the linen wound tight to the marrow, and one long vigil in the middle left out too long in the dry air. This is the Nile album to hand to the death metal fan who bounced off the band's density before, because the hooks are real, the drums are recorded like evidence and the ritual finally serves the songs instead of burying them. What it costs to skip is exact: the one point in the catalogue where a band famous for drowning its songs in ornament dug them back out of the sand with the hooks still attached.