The staying power of Nile, not to mention its rightful place among death metal royalty, has been firmly established for years now. They have never released a bad album – not even close – and in many ways redefined the brutal/traditional end of technical death metal (compared to, for example, a band like Necrophagist). Then again, I’m not sure “traditional” is even an appropriate description – you may instead want to insert “progressive.” We’ll keep “brutal” in there though. The point is that you can always count on Karl Sanders and Dallas Toler-Wade to continually up the death metal ante, and that includes Ithyaphallic, an album that I enjoyed only slightly less than Annihilation of the Wicked (the ultimate DM atom-smasher) and In Their Darkened Shrines, though it was on par with both of those releases from a creative standpoint. The short of it about Those Whom the Gods Detest is that the disc is not a game-raising album, though it is another grand Nile effort.

The important thing to understand about this assessment of Those Whom the God Detest is that it is not a question of whether it is a good or bad death metal album; it is a great death metal album any way you slice it. It is a matter of degree of greatness, an argument similar to one I made in a recent review of the new LP by The Chasm. Nile has raised the bar so high for death metal that calling a release a disappointment doesn’t really make a whole hell of a lot of sense. An examination of the new album in the context of the Nile catalogue as a whole reveals that is not as good as its three aforementioned predecessors, but better overall than either Amongst the Catacombs of Nephren-Ka and Black Seeds of Vengeance, at least from the standpoint of songwriting dynamics (yes, I love those first two albums too, but let’s try to be objective for fuck’s sake).

What “not as good as” really means though is that Nile has not topped themselves and for the first time – maybe the second, depending on your view of Ithyphallic – the band sounds more predictable and less technically dizzying. There was a time when a new Nile album was overwhelmingly shocking in its intensity and jaw-dropping in its technicality, but the genre has begun catching up with the South Carolina quartet the last few years and making those kinds of albums has become a lot harder.

Now that we’ve split hairs and qualified to a nauseating extent, the fact of the matter is that if you loved Nile before, there isn’t a damn thing about Those Whom the Gods Detest that will change your mind. Perhaps more telling is that most would still dub it one of the best death metal albums of 2009. The only difference from past years is that it will not be considered the best. The arrangements continue to be defined by swirling vortexes of solos and riffs, sometimes spiraling away from each other and sometimes meeting in the middle to synergistically create a whole new form of energy. Non-traditional (for metal) Middle Eastern instrumentation continues to be utilized and sounds great (check out “Yezd Desert Ghul Ritual in the Abandoned Towers of Silence”), while Toler-Wade’s vocals are the most intelligible of any Nile album to date, making the affair that much more accessible, relatively speaking of course. Other new twists include Islamic prayer (presumably) chants (e.g. “Fafir I”) and something approaching an actual sung chorus on the title track that initially takes one aback and then gradually grows into the album’s most memorable cut. In fact, I find the most recent spins of the disc to be far more enjoyable than the first few, so it does seem to be a grower.

What it all boils down to is that the vast majority of folks will find Those Whom the Gods Detest to be a first rate death metal album. It is only the death metal diehards (writers and fans alike) that will find any fault at all with the new effort. Perhaps what best sums up my view of the new album is that it will not be a Top 10 year-end list selection for me, but a Top 20, maybe 25, is a distinct possibility.

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