Nile - Those Whom The Gods Detest

Its been two years, since I last heard some original paralyzingly shitty Egyptian mumbo jumbo with some amazingly good brutal tech death metal. So I asked God give me more, and then bang in middle of November arrives Nile's album Those Whom The Gods Detest, where their vague obsession with Egyptian mythology continues with some astounding piece of death metal supremacy that makes me indulge in a flurry of neanderthal activities of chest thumping, jumping against the wall(you cant mosh by yourself all alone, can you?) and of course headbanging! Dont understand what I mean, then listen to the track 'Hittite Dung Incantations' and drool over how the chants of egyptian bullshit gives way to some absolute cruncher of riffs and beats the shit out of your sense!

Nile are one of the very few bands who have been able to combine brutality with technicality with a touch of natural flair. So much so, that not even once while listening to them, you feel that they consciously tell themselves to make their songs 'harder-faster-louder', its more like an underlying omnipresent compulsion for them to do so. And that's what you experience when you listen to their new album, though not in every single tracks. What makes Those Whom The Gods Detest standout from their earlier releases is the presence of tracks with slower than expected tempos like 4th Arra Of Dagon. Also the presence of more traditional Egyptian instruments makes the album more astute than ever.

Tracks like Permitting The Noble Dead To Ascend To The Underworld and Utterances of Crawling Dead ensure that they continue to maintain their stupefying spectacle of displaying their unrivaled death metal fireworks. And the brilliant sound production does absolute justice to such tracks. While Sanders and Toller Wade persist in belting out complex riffs after riffs at jaw-dropping tempo, Kollias ceaselessly plays the drums with precision matched to none. However not all's perfect in the album. Even though Sanders and Co play the the kind of music you expect Nile to play after listening to them over the years, somewhere in the album you do feel that parts of songs are reminiscent of their previous works. Eye of Ra and the title track stands as a testament to this unlikable detail.

Bass too is missing in action in the album, and this just makes me wonder how much more 'br00tal' the album would've sound if they had packed that extra punch of thumping bass! But nevertheless Those Whom The Gods Detest is a solid effort from Nile for their 5th studio venture. And though there are a couple of lows in it, none are big enough to make them appear like a bunch of rag dolls in the current death metal scene as they certainly hold more weight than other 'death metal' floating in the waters. So go break your neck listening to this album or you're certainly not worthy enough to call yourself a metalhead.