Review by Rexorcist for Nile - In Their Darkened Shrines (2002)

Normally it takes me one listen to an album to grasp it all.  But sometimes I need to flesh things out a little more.  In this instance, it was relistening to Nile's tertiary album, In Their Darkened Shrines, after going through a bunch of brutal death metal.  I'm in the middle of my death metal standards and opinions changing drastically, which may also reinvent how I rank my overall top 100 metal albums.  Now there was a lot I appreciated about this album, and there was a little I criticized.  Let's see how it pans out this time.

The intro started out similarly to how I would start out a tech metal album, weird and melodic at the same time.  Overtime, the album would cover a variety of moods and atmospheres with this single genre, taking time to be proggy, epic and doomy like with Unas, Slayer of the Gods, or speedy and catchy, like with Kheftiu Asar Butchiu, or just plain evil like Churning the Maelstrom, which reaches Devourment levels of brutality.  Notice, that this is only in the track 4-6 string. The general consensus after comparing this to albums by Suffocation and Defeated Snity, as well as ones I heard less recently but am still familiar with like Devourment and Disfiguring the Goddess, tells me that this album's primary focus is depth, not necessarily brutality or technicality.  However, the brutality never suffers.  Honestly, this is as brutal in its instrumental delivery as the Human Waste EP, but this album boasts a presence drawn in by its Egyptian subject matter, which means Nile are operating on a spiritual level, truly making ART in order to rise about the ranks of their genre.

While the style itself and the formatting of each song isn't always new or revolutionary, their moods and tricks are all healthy enough to keep the album entertaining.  This is largely because of a very strong depth to the band's personalities, effortlessly perfecting the "mood" aspects and overshadowing their own technical and songwriting skills, as good as the writing is on its own.  Our epic Unas, Slayer of the Gods is probably one of the finest death metal songs I've ever heard.  It's an 11-minute track I'd easily return to if I was in the mood, and honor I've only ever given two 11-minute epics in my life: Through Silver in Blood by Neurosis, and the album version of Anything for Love by Meat Loaf. And after having heard the doomy masterwork Cause of Death by Obituary and the slower and psychedelic Gateways to Annihilation by Morbid Angel, I have a much deeper appreciation for the ghostly depths of the droning sound effects of slower songs like I Whisper in the Ear of the Dead.  If I were to make a Halloween playlist, it wouldn't have any corny metal covers of Spooky Scary Skeletons.  It would be all about truly creepy atmospheres like the one I Whisper in the Ear of the Dead provides.  And the best part is that songs like that feels so consistent with faster-paced blasters like Wind of Horus, and even then, that track has an atmosphere in the middle that's not only furious, but slow building with an atmospheric guitar drone similar to atmo-black metal.

All of my needs for brutal death metal, specifically the begging for more depth and variety, are met in this hour long entry to a genre where even a half hour can feel overlong thanks to monotony and velocity.  The greatest albums in the world need DEPTH, and this is an album that's loaded with it.  It provides a unique experience that only Nile could provide thanks to their passion for myths, legends and themes.  I'm honestly having trouble deciding whether or not this is the greatest death album I've ever heard because it covers so much within the genre, and it doesn't even need brutal's famous subgenre, slam.  This might be a death metal album, but it goes beyond that.  In Their Darkened Shrines is a spiritual journey of the souls of the undead and their suffering over several millenniums.