August 23rd 20024 saw both Fleshgod Apocalypse and Nile release new albums. That’s the music equivalent if Deadpool  & Wolverine and Alien Romulus had been released on the same day. I love both but one has to be listened to and reviewed first,  and be seen first.

Well, hopefully, you already read my review of Fleshgod Apocalypse‘s Opera, which I loved and reviewed first, and now I think you know where this is going.

The Underworld Awaits Us All appears to be a bit of a reset for Nile.  First, they have jumped from long-time label Nuclear Blast who released the band’s last 5 albums to Napalm Records. And there are yet more new band members in Dan Vadim Von (Morbid Angel) replacing Brad Parris on bass/vocals (seems like they have been trying to fill Dallas Toler Wade’s shoes for a couple of albums now) and Zach Jeter (Lecherous Nocturne, Olkoth) now makes the band a 5 piece on guitars/vocals, joining Karl Sanders, Brian Kingsland (guitars/vocals), and George Kollias (drums). Though the now three-guitar attack isn’t really noticeable.

So what does this mean for album number 10 for these revered Egyptomaniacs after all these years? Well, its certainly still Nile. And The Underworld Awaits Us All is most certainly still a Nile album. But after 2015s What Should Not be Unearthed and 2019’s excellent Vile Nilotic Rites, it seems a bit of a step back, even with some added elements that Sanders has added.

Those new elements are often still buried in the band’s trademark dervish of Middle Eastern brutality, which still hits pretty hard, but Sanders dipping back into his early thrash metal roots can be heard ( his first band was a thrash band called Morriah) on tracks like “Chapter for Not Being Hung Upside Down on a Stake in the Underworld and Made to Eat Feces by the Four Apes” and some new choirs and female vocals add something different to “Overlords of the Black Earth”, “Naqada II Enter the Golden Age”, “Under the Curse of One God”, “Doctrine of Last Things” “True Gods of the Desert” and the title track.

But The Underworld Awaits Us All is ultimately still a Nile album. And I’d rank it somewhere around 2012s At the Gates of Sethu, and maybe 2007s Ithyphallic level of quality, that’s to say it’s not the band’s best work. It’s got all the Nile-ish things you’ve come to expect like absolutely relentless, dive-bombing Stuka-ish brutality on tracks like the aforementioned “Chapter for Not Being Hung Upside Down……”,   “Under the Curse of One God”, the almost black metal-ish “To Strike with Secret Fang” and “Naqada II Enter the Golden Age” (with more thrash metal riffage to close).

In fact the first half of the album is pretty focused on shorter faster songs, though there are a few more restrained moments buried within (ie ” “Overlords of the Black Earth”) but they don’t really do anything for me, and seem a bit phoned in.

It’s not until later in the album that we get the longer slower songs, which are always my favorite Nile songs (they have yet to top “Stones of Sorrow”, “To Dream of Ur” or “Unas”). There is “Doctrine of Last Things, which while a fast song it has one of the album’s more crushing slower riffs. Then there is the 7+ minute “True Gods of the Desert” and the 8-minute title track, both deliver my favorite about Nile– those slow massive, lumbering, churning crumbling riffs and more atmospheric pacing. In particular personal favorite “True Gods of the Desert”, which comes close to the aforementioned classic Nile tracks I love, and is in truth the first time I gave the stank face while listening to the album. Closer “Lament for the Destruction of Time” is a bit of an excessive 5-minute instrumental, slower song, that isn’t really needed when the prior title track seems like a perfect endpoint.

Production-wise, Mark Lewis returns to mix and master Sanders’s sound, it’s clear and allows all of the elements to breathe, but I still prefer the brutish, heftier tones of the debut (“Smashing the Antiu” and “Ramses” still cave my skull in).

In all an OK, to solid Nile album that’s not quite as good as the last 2,  and of course no match for the band’s first four classic efforts, but it is slightly better than At the Gates of Sethu, and  Ithyphallic but it certainly doesn’t blemish the band’s stellar, consistent discography.

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