VILE NILOTIC RITES Europe tour touched Seville last Friday night and made it special for Seville’s metal crowd as they had a chance to observe a fascinating performance of death metal titans Nile and Krisiun, together with supporting bands In Element and Eternal Psycho, which also promised to be interesting.
The first band to play was Eternal Psycho from Madrid. The group defines its genre as melodic industrial metal. I can say they have also something in common with groove and nu-metal. In general, not my cup of tea, but they performed quite well. It was a combination of clean female vocals with screaming, male growls (really liked it!), melodic and a bit grooved guitar riffs and electronic inclusions. Personally, I didn’t like the timbre and manner of clean vocals, which reminded me one well-known female-fronted Ukrainian metalcore band, but it’s a matter of taste, for sure. I cannot say it was technically bad. It’s worth to mention that the vocalist Beka made a good show on stage dancing, interacting with the audience etc. In 2022 the band released their 2nd album Trail of Agony, so they played a lot of songs from this one and some from their first album called Your Demons Are Real (f.e. “My demons”). To sum up, Eternal Psycho did a good start to the evening. Perhaps not the one you would expect from a death metal gig, but guys definitely managed to warm up the audience.
Then Argentinian guys In Element took the stage. My first impression – weird. Slipknot-styled masks, melodic guitar riffs that sometimes sounded like death metal, electronic music in industrial metal style, metalcore dissonances and riffs and a specific scream… and all seasoned with hardcore and nu-metal moments… and all this you can here in one song. Long story short – it’s really hard to get in which genre they are playing. I guess they had some lineup changes inside the band, as after the concert I’ve checked some previous releases/videos/lives and can admit that they sounded different, “heavier” and more interesting.
I wasn’t familiar with this band before the gig, and at some point, I thought “Looks like the guys are playing metal covers of 2000s pop hits or at least should do so” and here you go. The vocalist started to announce the next song saying “it’s gonna be a cover, but not really” and from the first notes I recognized good old “In The Air Tonight” originally written by Phil Collins. It was a surprise the audience did not expect. I guess it’s a good idea to cover this one, but the implementation could be better – a mix was a bit poor.
By the end of their performance, I felt still weird, but I can say that despite some confusions, there were moments that I liked. It was hard to get what the band is about and what did they try to tell us, but it was fun in some way to observe. I think the guys should work on live sound and the whole idea in general, if they want to be more than “just for fun” band.
And now it’s time for one of co-headliners Brazilian death metal veterans Krisiun. With this band I finally breathed out. Pure death metal in its best traditions, good sounding mix of instruments, technical guitar solos and drum blastbeats were so pleasing to the ear and to the mind. I would like to mention that this trio plays together for 30+ years without any line-up changes (almost). This fact excites me a lot, because they still sound very brutal, raging and technical just as many years ago.
In comparison with the first 2 groups, Krisiun gathered much bigger audience, but the people were so sluggish and passive… didn’t react anyhow on musicians’ interactions, so that guys even started joking about it. I felt a bit of this “Spanish shame” and was asking myself all the time “Seville, what’s wrong with you?!”. Nevertheless, each band player was dedicated as hell.
The set started with Kings of Killing which was in a good way like a slap in the face – so furious and mighty. Earlier this year guys released their twelve LP called Mortem Solis and performed “Serpent Messiah”, “Swords into flash” and “Necronomical” on this event to let us hear the part of it live. I was also looking forward to hear some oldies, so it was nice to hear some songs from Apocalyptic Revelation, Conquerors of Armageddon, Southern Storm and others. Altogether it was a successful and powerful death metal riot that brought me a lot of emotions and pleasure.
The last band to play was technical/brutal death icon from United States Nile. I am a fan of this band for many years, however, never had a chance to see them live, so I had my “double-expectations” and looking ahead, I must say that all of them were met. This band stands out from the crowd at least because of their specific musical atmosphere and lyrical themes inspired by Egyptian mythology. Probably that’s why their whole performance was like a magic ritual.
Starting with legendary “Sacrifice Unto Sebek”, they totally crashed the crowd with crazy blastbeats and extremely fast guitars and bass on “Defiling the Gates of Ishtar”. During “Kafir!” people started screaming “There is no God” together with musicians. It was really powerful when Karl, Scott and new bass player Julian David Guillen started to sing together. Julian, by the way, showed high level of play and was active and wild on stage, it was nice to observe. The drummer played like a god. Actually, it was obvious that we had musicians with the highest level of professionalism in front of us.
Nile also played such greatest hits as “Sarcophagus”, “Lashed to the Slave Stick”, “4th Arra of Dagon”, “In the Name of Amun” etc. An hour flew by like a minute for me. Just unforgettable performance, even better than I could imagine, nothing to add.
Here we are again, our big metal family rejoicing. Great line-up, great venue, metalheads, drinks… all these led to an overall fantastic evening filled with a lot of good music and positive emotions.
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