The masturbators of the war god, Nile, are back with their sixth full length effort titled Those Whom The Gods Detest. For those of you familiar with the earlier works of Nile you already know what to expect from this effort and have already decided whether you’re going to be interested in this or not.

For those of you who are new to death metal, or have simply been living in a cave for the past decade, Nile are a South Carolina-based three-piece death metal outfit who’ve built a cult following for their inventive fusion of blasting technical death metal and non-traditional Middle Eastern influences. In essence, the music of Nile is like playing a blasting death metal album and an ancient Egyptian-themed movie soundtrack in unison.

Despite the band’s popularity, I’ve never been a fan of Nile. I’ve always found they put style over substance with regards to their music. Recent efforts have reminded me very much of late 90s-early 00s Dying Fetus and Cannibal Corpse, not stylistically, but just in the manner that they started out with a successful more simplistic approach and rather than continue creating catchy music, they decided to try to be the fastest, most technical, most blastingly brutal band in the scene, all while completely forgetting how to write a memorable riff, let alone a memorable song or worthwhile album.

On Those Whom The Gods Detest it seems Nile have decided to do something they haven’t done in quite a while and are actually making an effort to write some good material and with moderate success. The album starts out with easily the best Nile song in quite a while, “Kafir!”, which sees an even mix of blasting and shredding and mid-paced chugging. Enough time and effort is put into the song writing and structure to actually make it worthy of several listens, which surprised the shit out of me considering how quickly I tend to zone out while listening to Nile albums.

The solid song writing continues on the following track, “Hittie Dung Incantation”, although this is also where things start to fall apart as the vocal cadence does not match the music in the slightest which takes away from the song quite a bit. They follow up with some pure technical Cannibal Corpse worship to start out “Utterances Of The Crawling Dead”, however don’t go overboard and stick with a relatively more simplistic catchy death metal approach.

The title track starts with non-traditional acoustic guitar playing, before breaking into a mix of high paced technical shredding and slow paced plodding chugging. The faster material is typical of Nile, but the slow paced approach is something I don’t recall hearing on previous efforts, then again I usually fall asleep after 5 minutes. It almost seems like Nile are attempting to bring Incantation-style doom into their material, but simply aren’t capable of pulling it off. “4th Arra Of Dagon” is a continuation of this snail’s paced approach and gets old after about two minutes but continues on for another six and a half minutes.

“Permitting The Noble Dead To Descend To The Underworld” sees Nile returning to their typical blasting/shredding style. This track is followed by a typical Egyptian atmospheric song, which I guess is them giving a reach around to the war god, or something. Following this interlude are the remaining three tracks “Kem Khefa Kheshef”, “The Eye Of Ra” and “Iskander Dhul Kharnon”, all three of which are mid-to-up tempo death metal tracks which don’t flow very well and drone on for far too long.

On the whole, the song writing on Those Whom The Gods Detest is a vast improvement over previous releases through the first three tracks, but quickly deteriorates into some of Nile‘s most boring and uninspired material to date shortly thereafter. The guitar playing of Karl Sanders and Dallas Toler-Wade is solid, technically they’re very proficient, but the songwriting is more miss than hit. The vocal performances of both Karl and Dallas are pretty solid as well. The drumming of George Kollias is technically solid, but he relies on his triggers far too much and it often makes his drumming sound too mechanical. He does show some decent range as a drummer by being able to slow things way down and stick to a more simplistic approach on the slower tracks, but generally his drumming tends to distract my attention more than it flows with what Karl and Dallas are doing.

Nile are what they are. Their fans already know what to expect and whether they’ll like it before they even listen to it for the first time. Non-fans, such as myself, may find enjoyment out of the first 16 minutes of material on Those Whom The Gods Detest but will quickly lose interest and not make their way through the final 40. The album isn’t worthless, but it isn’t a must-own either. Nile do a few good things, but not enough to be worth spending money on this release. It was nice to see them attempt to go in a slightly different direction musically, unfortunately, they just aren’t good enough song writers to come up with a full album of quality material. It’s better than I expected, but still typically unsatisfying overall.

Review byTeufel