Nile - At The Gate Of Sethu

For the longest time, in terms of death metal, if you weren’t Cannibal Corpse you weren’t getting a decent draw in Philadelphia. That is unless you were Nile. Although they were regularly upstaged by their main support (Napalm Death & Kreator to name a few), Nile was able to get the death metal community to come out in droves. Never one to conform to trends, mastermind Karl Sanders and his band mates always came forth with a very solid outing of technical death metal with an Egyptian flare. The non-conformity garnered respect from the diehard fans to the casual listener and even extended to those death metal fans that didn’t really like them. 19 years with 11 previous releases (including 6 full lengths) the band has made some notable changes to their sound with the release of At The Gate Of Sethu.

I’ve always like Nile. Sure there were always bands that got a heavier rotation from me but I always found myself drifting back to albums like Amongst The Catacombs Of Nephren-Ka and Black Seeds Of Vengeance. I lump these two underappreciated records my personal list of “must haves” of death metal. I will argue up and down that Ramses Bringer Of War is easily in the top 10 death metal songs of all time. In the many years that I’ve been listening to Nile, whether they got the spins of others, I’ve always respected them. They were one band that I knew what I was getting every time they released something new. Were some albums better than others? Sure, but they kept the formula consistent for many years. Now here we are almost 2 decades after they started, they’ve made some notable changes. It’s mostly in the vocal department but it’s enough of a significant change to make me question their decision. It’s not like we, the audience, were warmed up to this.

For years the vocals were always your standard deep growl made famous by the likes of Chris Barnes. They didn’t stand out like some of the other vocalists of the genre but they were sufficient and worked very well with Nile’s straight forward approach. In fact, the vocals were almost never that important anyway because the music was always that good that you didn’t care what they were saying. Now with the release of Sethu they’ve incorporated new half-yelling type vocals. I’m not entirely sure who is doing it but it was very annoying the first run through of the record. It took a few listens to warm up to them as much as I’m going to and even still, it’s single handedly the fact that this is quickly going to lose my interest and probably begin it’s life as a dust collector in my collection. It’s a shame too because the musicianship on this record is top notch. The guitar work is fantastic and the drums are really fun to listen to but, man, these vocals are awful. They still do the standard “death growl” so I’m confused why they used these other vocals too. They even have some clean vocals used early in the album but luckily they only take place in brief instances on the 2nd track of the record. Unless I missed something, they never make their return again. Funny though is that song was the first “single” of the record too.

Super fans of Nile will probably be able to get around the new vocal approach but not me. I’ll probably listen to this record a few more times just to appreciate the drum work, because it really is that much fun to listen too, but after that I don’t know that I’ll ever revisit this record again. With records like the previously mentioned Nephren-Ka and Black Seeds, why should I even bother with this?

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