Special report by Chris Bruni.

Berlin, Germany: the location is the illustrious Pergamon Museum where BW&BK;, along with other select journalists have gathered for an exclusive listening session for the highly anticipated new NILE album, Ithyphallic (out July 20th via Nuclear Blast).

Very adequate then that such a listening experience take place at the Pergamon, the overwhelming museum located on Museum Island in Berlin that houses many ancient artifacts excavated from Ancient Egypt and the Middle East. Excavations that include many artifacts and statues to massive excavations that include such jaw-dropping monuments as the Ishtar Gate, the Pergamon Altar, and the Market Gate Of Miletus. It’s definitely quite an experience to visit such a museum nonetheless, one which is that much more special when you are browsing around in with an MP3 player playing the new Nile album as the soundtrack to your guide throughout.

Consisting of ten tracks, the Neil Kernon produced (once again) Ithyphallic’s track listing goes as follows: ‘What May Be Safely Written’, ‘As He Creates, So He Destroys’, ‘Ithyphallic’, ‘Papyrii Containing The Spell To Preserve Its Possessor Against Attacks From He Who Is In The Water’, ‘Eat Of The Dead’, ‘Laying Fire Among Apep’, ‘The Essential Salts’, ‘The Infinity Of Stone’, ‘The Language Of The Shadows’, and the epic closing track ‘Even The Gods Must Die’.

With every Nile album, of course it is expected that one of the most important bands in all of death metal will present a new challenge with every listen. And with Ithyphallic, Nile may have offered what is possibly their most challenging album to date. Clocking in this time at just under 50 minutes, where speed is not of main concern as much this time (although ‘Papyrii...’, according to producer Kernon, goes 270 bpm, the fastest the band have ever gone!), where there are actually not as many guitar solos (although some of the most memorable Nile guitar solos are to be found on here, especially the one that helps climax the final track, which will go down as one of the best metal solos of the year), and where the production this time focuses more on clarity (without loosing the ferocity) and pronunciation (especially in the delivery of lead vocalist/guitarist Dallas Toler-Wade’s vocals), the Ozzfest bound Nile have constructed an extremely doomy, brutal, ambient, riff warping and stretching complex work of avant-death metal art.

“It refers to the ancient practice where statues of God’s had mythically proportioned erections as a sign of strength and fertility,” says founder/guitarist/vocalist Karl Sanders about the album’s title. “When we were just a demo band, way back, back in those days we would mail out these little fliers saying that we play ‘Ithyphallic Metal’. And this word just stuck with the band for years. Then on the last record (Annihilation Of The Wicked), Dallas came up with the idea to call the record Ithyphallic. The band loved the idea, but we got snubbed out by Relapse! But this time, THIS time goddamnit we’re gonna call it Ithyphallic! And we’re even gonna fuckin’ write a song called ‘Ithyphallic’ and tie it all together!”
“This album has a bit of a different slant on things,” continues Sanders about the lyrical approach. “There’s a lot more Lovecraft influence this time, plus a lot of Necronomicon influence; not so much is taken strictly from Ancient Egyptian text. We wanted to take it to a few new different places but keep our identity. It’s not a concept album though. It’s more of a collection of songs with the general strong angry vibe.”
“This time around though it was different” continues Toler-Wade on the music writing process. “We’ve been working with George (Kollias – drummer) for a couple of years now, and it’s definitely more of a hands on thing with everybody in the band now. Karl and I would come to practice with riffs, or stuff we have demoed to a click track or something, and George would put the drums to it. So we worked on this album together as a unit.”
“Neil Kernon produced again,” says Sanders about working once again with the veteran producer. “Neil also came in early for some pre-production, hung out with us at rehearsals and got to know the songs and the material. 51 days to complete the album, most of which consisted of 14 hour days. But this is a much cleaner recording than anything we’ve done in the past.”

Toler-Wade: “I think all in all, what we wanted to do with the songs is just make it as expressive as possible. It’s difficult to do that if you can’t hear what’s going on. If you can hear everything that’s going on, the expression is there. We just wanted it to be a cleaner and tighter album so you can hear all the details. And paying attention to detail and annunciation of the words and get everything right. We just spent a lot of time on this and working with Neil the second time around was better too. He got us to that next point with Annihilation and we knew what we wanted to do this time around as well to make it even better.”