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Nile Concert Review
In 2007, Nile toured the U.S. as part of Ozzfest, managing to fit in some headlining off-dates along the way. One such show taking place on a scorching summer day at The Pearl Room in Mokena, where they delivered a set that remains one of the most uncompromising displays of power I’ve ever seen at that venue. In the months that followed, the band continued to tour, reaching Germany, Finland, and even Mexico in a tireless march from one hemisphere to the next. Now, with hardly a break to speak of, Nile have returned to the U.S in support of ‘Ithyphallic’, their latest full-length, this time as full headliners. Without the time constraints of Ozzfest, the members of the band have taken the opportunity as to schedule performance clinics (George Kollias at Guitar Center) and offer lessons (Karl Sanders at the venues) as they trek across the country. And, following the U.S. leg of the ‘Ithyphallic’ tour, Nile are headed to Europe once again, this time with Grave and Belphegor in support—as undeniably metal a tour as one could wish for.
For American audiences, the ‘Ithyphallic’ tour has tapped local talent more geared to a mass audience in Suicide Silence, The Faceless, Canada’s Unexpect, and newcomers Warbringer. Unfortunately, by the time the tour rolled into The Metro in Chicago, a broken-down van forced Unexpect to cancel. The resulting dynamic was interesting—three relatively upstarts from California supporting the Carolinian veterans—but the loss of Unexpect was sorely felt in the show’s first hours.
The Metro is one of the more invigorating venues in the city: clean, spacious, but still intimate at around 1,000 capacity, and sharing the block with storied Wrigley Field. It has unfortunately developed a reputation for mediocre sound, however, and on this evening could not escape criticism. Some bands had imbalanced sound or feedback issues, while Nile’s set was said to be simply too loud by some on the balcony. I spend most of my time in the photo pit or as close to front and center as I can get (with an expensive camera), where the sound tends to be rather good, so these complaints only came to me second-hand.
Opening the night was Warbringer, a fresh-faced troupe who’d have us believe that Reagan is president and the Walkman is the hot new gadget on the block. Calling their style ‘Combat Thrash’, Warbringer are a total experience time machine back to the 80’s Bay Area. Brimming with torrid solo duels, d-beat gunning, raw vocals, sophomoric lyrics, gang choruses, Warbringer lays it on with irrepressible enthusiasm. Even their look is old school, from the shocks of long corkscrew hair to old school T’s and the pièce de résistance—the unlaced white Reeboks.
And these kids can play. Tearing through their half-hour set with precision and flair, Warbringer incited the crowd to any number of moshes and circle pits to set a boisterous tone that would carry through the rest of the night. With tracks like ‘Instrument of Torture’, ‘Total War’, and ‘Combat Shock’, Warbringer seize a two-fisted hold onto the legacy of Slayer and Exodus and carry the audience right along with them. Indeed, given how the old guard of thrash have stumbled in recent years, perhaps Warbringer and company could teach their idols a thing or two, or at least reintroduce them to the vigor and carefree spirit that set off the movement those many years ago.
Following there was The Faceless, another Californian group from a distinctly more modern school. Along with a host of other SoCal tech-wizards, through endless touring The Faceless have taken the genre of tech/deathcore from a Myspace phenomenon to national prominence. After forming in ’05, the band quickly debuted with ‘Akeldama’ and seem to have been on the road ever since, exchanging vocalists and drummers as necessary. Lineup volatility in groups of this style and of this age is no uncommon thing, but The Faceless’s most recent vocalist catch, Mica Maniac, was an unexpected one. While the rest of the band appears to practically of age with Warbringer, Mica is a relatively old hand in the scene, having played in bands at least a decade before Michael Keen (guitar) and Brandon Giffin (bass) thought to form The Faceless. Sporting hair slicked back to his shoulders and a deeply forked beard, Mica isn’t old enough to be Keene’s father, but he certainly could pass as a Drosselmeyer-esque evil uncle.
Visual misfit though he was, Mica certainly was right at home on the stage and took very well to The Faceless’s clinical cruch. Too, like Rydquist before him, he was the only (non-drumming) member of the band to exude much visual energy. His long arms would sweep out over the front row as he crouched on the monitor like a vulture, then cut down in emphasis to punctuate a line. Though he did cup the mic during his low growls, his vocals were crisp and expressive, and he handled both new and ‘old’ songs with equal ease. The rest of the band played with excellent unity, as usual, but their stage presence is rather inert, and Mica could only do so much to keep everyone engaged. Still, along with Suicide Silence they had drawn enough dancing scenesters to keep the crowd attentive throughout, if mostly just to avoid a foot in the head.
Their new material didn’t seem to be too great a departure form ‘Akeldama’, but this may be due in part to the keyboards being all but inaudible through the entire set. After 30 minutes, they closed with their best song, ‘An Autopsy’, which elicited the strongest reaction so far and primed the crowd for the next group, Suicide Silence.
When I had looked at the running order at the beginning of the night, it had seemed odd that the two groups had not been switched, but after Suicide Silence’s set I have no doubts as to which group had the bigger draw that night. Playing a set that was essentially 29 minutes of breakdowns and one minute of Family Guy samples, Suicide Silence pushed the Metro’s PA’s and its hardcore dance quotient to new limits.
At the beginning of the night, I had noticed a clutch of girls standing towards the side of the stage, looking earnestly intrigued but still a little out of place, and had wondered which group they were here to see. When Mitch Lucker took the stage with hair artfully swept and a coating of tattoos beneath his v-neck white shirt, the girls’ enthusiasm and outstretched arms gave me my answer. To his credit, though, Mitch is more than just a pretty boy; his passion for the music and his showmanship are unquestionable, and he handled the few insults tossed his way (“hardcore dancing sucks!”, etc.) with aplomb. Before the set, a roadie had brought out two empty crates and set them upside down between the monitors, and during the set Mitch would use them to or howl down at the audience from on high or as a launching pad for his breakdown stomps.
The rest of the group didn’t quite match his enthusiasm, but were all still more involved than The Faceless had been. It was also amusing to note how the appearances of the two were reversed. The Faceless being a new-school group with an old-school looking vocalist, with Suicide Silence just the opposite; aside from Mitch, all of the Suicide Silence members were scraggly looking fellows, long-haired or bearded.
The dancing carried on through almost their entire set, though none of it was especially well-executed. The effects of a weeknight crowd, perhaps. If nothing else, though, it was certainly energetic, and during their last track in particular, ‘Destruction of a Statue’, the dancing and moshpit reached a combined peak. From one side of the room to the other, a wide swath was cut, perhaps six rows deep, with a constant flux of dancing, circle pits, and general havoc carrying on until the band were done around 7:30.
Through this point, the layover music had been metal, nothing either too unexpected or unpleasant, relying on such staples as Testament. Once Suicide Silence left the stage, though, the soundtrack became exclusively orchestrated. The kind of music one would expect to hear put to sweeping medieval battles, the unveiling of towering monuments, or cataclysmic disaster films. Nile had arrived.
When 8:00 rolled around, the crowd had changed, too. Once a fair balance between metalheads and scenesters, it now was dominated by the former, who had filtered to the front during the layover. They peered towards the edges of the stage, cheering at even a glimpse of a band member and when George Kollias’s kit was unveiled, and strangers in the audience struck up conversation about the band’s dominance and potent live show. By the time the lights went down, the front half of the room was unanimous in chanting the band’s name and raising the horns. At one point, a group in the front row managed to pull off a six-man horn salute: each participant with a fist clenched, the outer pair with pinkies raised.
It was an excessive gesture, to be sure, but a celebratory one and still somehow appropriate. Few groups have been able to combine the extremes of metal as well as Nile has—its erudite highs, primitive lows, trenchant technicality and sheer aural force. After spending their first decade as a band honing the balance, Nile’s last two records have masterfully exploited the full range of their influences and inspiration. Their grasp of dynamics has also carried over into the live setting, where they combine solos and sweeps as precise as anything laid down by The Faceless with gigantic epics and climactic riffs that descend ever more slowly into wailing feedback like a dinosaur stumbling into a tar pit.
As a result, Nile’s set is just plain fun to watch. Karl Sanders, as usual, looked simply delighted to be performing: beaming triumphantly at the crowd after each epic song, scrunching up his face as he hit a harmonic, or trading out guitars like a child at Christmas with more toys than he knows how to handle. (Sadly, however, he did not unveil the Kxk Warrior with the spear-shaped headstock.) At center stage was Dallas, one of metal’s great communicators, effortlessly winning the crowd to his side with his everyman appearance and knowing grimace. He, like Nile’s music, manages to balance two extremes—severity and levity—knowing that while their lyrics may be scriptural and their music quite brutal, Nile are still just a heavy metal band from South Carolina singing about Bronze Age Egypt. Though not quite as jovial as Karl, Dallas still managed to show that he was having some fun; his solos would be matched with odd facial contortions, a couple lyrical passages emphasized by a swift tuck of the flying V towards his crotch, tremolo picking and growling all the while.
After opening with ‘What Can Be Safely Written’, the setlist ran (as close as I can tell): ‘Sacrifice Unto Sebek’, ‘The Black Flame’, Papyrus…’, ‘Cast Down the Heretic’, Ithyphallic’, ‘Eat of the Dead’, ‘Ramses, Bringer of War’, ‘The Essential Salts’, ‘Lashed to the Slave Stick’, ‘Annihilation of the Wicked’, ‘Black Seeds of Vengeance’, and their defining epic as closer, ‘Unas, Slayer of the Gods’. It was a pleasure to see this setlist vary some from their last time around, particularly with the older songs that sound better live than they do on record. The set was also remarkable in its endurance demands, with four songs exceeding six minutes, not to mention the staple highlight ‘Cast Down The Heretic’, with its absurdly epochal solo battle between Karl’s exotic scales or bends and Dallas’s frenetic shredding that takes up the entire middle of the song.
The band’s other two members were also exemplary, though Dallas and Karl still overshadowed them to an extent. Bassist Chris Lollis has done a superb job fitting in with the band over these recent tours, and can match either guitarist in simultaneous playing and singing. Nile isn’t a band often suggested for their great bassists, but Chris’s vocals were excellent and his fretwork no less impressive—if ‘Lashed to the Slave Stick’ seems hard on guitar, try it on bass.
Of course, no Nile set would be complete without an equally superlative drummer. In recent years, and hopefully for many more, that man has been George Kollias. Now one of death metal’s most respected percussionists, George displayed once again the talent that has taken him so quickly to the top: stunning speed, versatility, and an unshakeable endurance. As he played, he often let his head fall back with eyes closed, and bathed in the blue light from above he looked peaceful enough to be praying.
However they appeared as individuals, Nile remained completely united in their performance. In this respect, as much as in their musicianship and songwriting, they rose above the other bands of the night. During their years together—especially Dallas and Karl—the band has developed an excellent dynamic that both tightens up their sound and is rewarding to watch from the audience. More so than any of the others before them, Nile were truly a band, playing off one another and working as a unit instead of simply appearing to practice on a stage. This energy was transferred to the audience, who didn’t let even a single song go by without starting a pit, and even were marching in circles during the interlude ‘The Infinity of Stone’.
After nearly an hour and a half, Nile’s set reached its conclusion in ‘Unas…’, which spiraled to a peak with Dallas unleashing a final bestial roar, pulling on his tremolo arm until the strings were sagging (this was visible from the fourth row), while the other members raised their instruments or arms in salute with low chords ringing. Nearly every audience member on the floor had the horns up in response, and even the most exhausted of us, myself among them, managed to offer up one last cheer as the band departed.
Ever the magnanimous one, Karl stayed behind to shake hands and sign some autographs, but the crowd was too big for me to wait out. Semi-conscious, I stumbled from the venue and found a parking ticket on my car that set me back twice the admission price. Few things could have fazed me in that moment, though, with ears still ringing and innards thoroughly mashed. I pocketed the ticket, dropped the convertible top, and sped off home in the 40 degree chill of the night. On the way, my spirits were restored as I though back to something Dallas had said during their set…
“Let me hear your death growl!” The crowd bellowed in response. He demanded it again, and we were only too happy to reply, filling the air with primal grunts and leaving the security guards bemused. “That’s right,” Dallas said with his trademark scowl, half-serious, half the showman. “That’s why this other shit will come and go, but true metal will never die.”
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