Take the guitar away from Nile's Karl Sanders, and you might not grok his demographic. Raggy blond hair, burly frame in black T-shirt, shorts -- he looks as if he's about to pull some crawdads out of a South Carolina crick. Then his gold ankh pendant tells you he's an ancient-Egypt nerd, so huh? Then you hear him play, and you learn his real secret.
Nile brought some of the spooky atmospherics and disembodied wails you hear on their records, but mostly they gripped us with variety. Even in a single song, as in 2015's "Call to Destruction" (Sanders' protest against radical Islamists blowing up ancient artifacts), Nile hit us fast, ground the tempo downward slick as ya please, stop-started, riffed and twiddled tight enough to bugger a scarab beetle. The band seemed especially amped about cuts from their fearsome new "Vile Nilotic Rites," such as "Long Shadows of Dread," with its rolling surges, multi-riff challenges and classically steeped solos. Sanders, as aggressively as he attacked his fretboard, nevertheless dialed in metronomic control and textbook scalework to show he's no crazed kid. The same went for his essential longtime teammate, drummer George Kollias, whose every double-kick onslaught, cymbal accent and five-tom roll dropped right on the dime. Newer members Brad Parris (bass) and Brian Kingsland (guitar) contributed significantly with both axwork and co-equal but distinctive deathgrowl alternations. After a quarter century, Nile looked as if they were still accelerating.
Drummer Pete Sandoval first became visible with Terrorizer (tonight's special support) in 1986, left them to join Morbid Angel in 1988, and had a long run with that wild-ass Florida death-metal gang before backaches sidelined him for years. Tonight's restaffed Terrorizer trio put the spotlight where it belonged, on Sandoval's distinctive mastery of his huge kit. While barking bassist-vocalist Sam Molina and tongue-protruding guitarist Lee Harrison made plenty of room with punky chants and simple riffs, we were left to wonder what in heck Sandoval was doing to those drums, synchronizing to internal rhythms that often seemed only intuitively connected to his bandmates. His accents and counterbeats lifted metal abstraction to levels only hinted at in the band's 2018 "Caustic Attack," and it was kind of fascinating, especially in retrospect. Could the full-house crowd mosh to it? The blazingly cruel "Sharp Knives" proved yeah.
Journeyman SoCal quartet Dark As Death made their short set count with a focused thrash & doom humpa-humpa charge, somewhat generic but skilled, committed and real. Where can we get their soundz?
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PHOTO BY FUZZY BANKH.