Rivers Of Nihil - Where Owls Know My Name

The face of a man who wakes up with back pain

Off To Nihil Nihil Land

So full disclosure, I’m cheating a bit here. The original idea for this New Year’s resolution was partly to spend more time appreciating full albums and partly a way to ingest the unique recommendations of my diverse work colleagues. Thus far, I have not been disappointed on either of those fronts. I work with some uniquely musical individuals who have given me a years worth of sonic goodies to enjoy.

With that being said, I shared this endeavor with my brother and he immediately had a recommendation that fit just too perfectly within this growing collection of eclectic sonic oddities. Also, I owe a pretty large swath of my musical palette to my brother’s influence so giving his submission a bump here is a sin we’re all just going to have to be ok with. You alright with me doing that? Good. Now let’s talk about metal.

I searched for 'god' in the stock images and it gave me cinnamon rolls. Who am I to argue?

The gods made heavy metal

This will be extremely brief, mostly because we will all be internet judged one day by which words we used to discuss the genre of metal and the bands listed under its holy umbrellas. Metal is one of those genres that you must tread lightly with. Its apostles have burned down churches, summoned wizards, decapitated bats with their teeth and mostly, smoked a whole lot of weeeeeed. For you young readers, metal is like K-Pop but greasier and hairier.

I bring this up because much of my love and understanding of the genre came from the bands my brother listened to when I was younger. Metallica was by far the most prevalent with One being the first song I remember singing to myself alone, desperately trying to remember what the words were. We will pretend that the first cassette tape I was ever gifted wasn’t Billy Ray Cyrus, THAT is completely irrelevant. I was 100% cooler than that and never memorized the words to Some Gave All BEFORE Creeping Death because admitting so would make me a loser and I am spending waaaaaay to much time trying to make you believe otherwise with these reviews.

Beyond the diatribe around Hetfield cutting his hair in the 90s, I remember Halloweens spent decorating our porch and my brothers bangin CD player blasting Acid Bath, Type O Negative, Megadeth, Children of Bodom, Opeth and like… ManoWar (probably) because those bands were all evil… and SPOOKY (except ManoWar, they weren’t spooky. They were the band that got wedgies from all the other bands in high school). There is nearly a decade age difference between my elder sibling and I. So when I entered Junior High school he was already graduated and moving on to bands that I thought were kind of lame at the time. Korn, Coal Chamber and Deftones were not vibing with me the way they did for him and it was at this point where our musical tastes began to divulge pretty significantly.

I got into really super awesome and cool dude stuff like The Flaming Lips and Pink Floyd while he was listening to Limp Bizkit (HAHAHAHAHA he is probably reading this and can’t do a DAMN thing about me just making shit up right now!) Although he did bust me stealing his copy of The Slim Shady LP one day and left me a note saying he wouldn’t rat me out to mom if I put it back in his room before he got home from work and that… was pretty solid bro. I take it back, he was never into Limp Bizkit as far as I know… it was Creed. History will decide if the truth or fiction was the greater insult!

Anyways, I lied about this being brief but it was worth giving a little back story to set the stage for why my brother recommending a metal album carries a lot of weight. He introduced me to some fantastic bands over the years and I was fully prepared for Rivers Of Nihil to be another Ghost or Matthew Ryan (who is absolutely not Metal but just a damn fine Country/Blues dude who released one of my all time favorite albums and then did nothing else of note) but instead, RoN is… RoN is very very weird. Don’t get me wrong, it’s the good weird but it’s a weird that defies absolutely any and all expectations. It’s the weird that begins with kick drums coming at you with furious thundering precision at 666 Beats Per Minute only to be sideswiped by a god damn saxophone solo… I’m not joking, this thing is fucking beautiful in THAT kind of way.

So journey with me now, to where everybody knows your name (a hooters located in the middle of a filthy swamp you sick freak you)

Track By Track

Cancer/Moonspeak

We open on a quiet and ethereal sounding overture. Some majestic Juno synth chords invite us to come in and look around swamp dudes shrek hut. It’s pretty chill, swamp man comes in with his Peter Steele sounding vocals. We’re snuggling in, wondering when things are going to pop off. The bass line is giving me serious Pink Floyd “Good bye Cruel World” vibes and I’m totally cool with that because like I mentioned in my opening novel, I was 14 once and The Wall “spoke to me” and whatnot. Oh boy, here comes the distorted guitar swells leading into…

The Silent Life

DAAAAAAAAAAAMN! The drums are absolutely overwhelming on this one. My ankles throb thinking about how fast the kick drums are getting pummeled, seriously if nothing else listen to this track to appreciate how inhumanly talented the drummer alone is. If those don’t grab your attention, keep listening because there are so many layers that keep introducing themselves; that quiet synth riff that sounds like distant sirens, the guitar riffs staying lock step with the speed and intensity of the drums then taking turns twisting in and out of rests that make you think we might be preparing for a breakdown only to slap viciously back to the beat.

So the vocals… personally I am not a huge fan of death metal growl screaming as a lot of times it is just distracting to me. RoN strike a very delicate balance on this song though where the vocals slot nicely along the chaos of the instrumentations that it did not bother me at all. Some later tracks are not as favorable with me because of the growling but here they work well.

Once we reach the halfway point we go into this Dream Theater sounding guitar solo and right the hell out of left field comes the saxophone. Imagine sitting at a bar listening to this heavy ass Metal band and suddenly Kenny G enters stage left and starts saxing all over the place… I mean he’s got the hair for metal and I would be lying if I said the sax doesn’t sound absolutely delicious poured over the metal feast we’re served here.

Good track? No. GREAT track!

A Home

Another solid track, best on the album in hindsight. Tight groove, chugga chugga guitars, growls like a lion in labor AND weird left turn trumpets

OLD HOME

The drums on this album are just… so fucking metal! This track they are the star of the show again and just assault you right in the chest in rapid fire succession. Few listening experiences can make you feel physically exhausted but that is exactly what listening to songs like this one will do to you. Just drained by the time you hit the bridge where things ‘Nihil’ down a little bit and give you a chance to breath for a couple minutes followed immediately by a drop back into the drum pit. Very cool track, I didn’t like it as much at first but upon multiple relistens it leave an impression.

Subtle Change (Something, Something, Prog Metal Titling Here)

If you had read this review a couple months ago when I lazily finished it initially, you will recall that I gave up on these middle songs due to just not being able to click with them. From a technical standpoint they are absolutely incredible but from a ‘shit, I just want to chill out and put on some tunes’ perspective this track and the ones immediately before and after it are difficult listens. This one is straight up prog metal, they bust out the organ that every prog metal band is legally required to include on their tracks. They do the big prog metal buildup from slow start to thundering stadium smashing epic. Its like a ‘Rush’ song if Geddy Lee had tonsilitis and was also gargling maple syrup. Skull busting double kick drums, prog organ, the god damn saxophone breakdown in the middle that acts like a warm blanket in the middle of an avalanche… it all creates the chaotic good end of this albums runtime. This song rips so hard.

Terrestria III

Ok.. were doing like a TOOL thing now which is cool. Musical interlude track, I dig it but nothing all that special.

Hollow

The drums actually take a bit of a backseat on this one. We still get thundering double bass and that killer snare but I did notice it felt a lot safer here. I miss the big fills and weird rhythms I was getting used to. Other than that, this one has some great guitar solos but the vocalist sounds a little off like he was running out of juice by this point in the recording, which, who could blame him? My throat hurts listening to him. Hollow uses a lot more of the hardcore style call and response vocals which a band like this doesn’t really need. This was the most ‘meh’ song for me.

Death Is Real

Thanks assholes. You just have to keep reminding us that were all going to worm food one day? Was that necessary to do? Could you have named this song ‘bacon is high in fat and you should probably limit your daily intake’ instead and got the same message across? Probably. Anyway, this one is alright. I get that exhaustion kicking in again where they gave me all these glimpses of what a weird and quirky band Nihil can be and then we get tracks like Hollow and DIR where they stick to doing middle aged dad hardcore. I am totally fine with that, but like a teacher in May I know you are capable of doing weird and I really wish you would apply yourself more and give us more weird.Not strings? No Sax? No Mongolian pan flutes?

Yawn…

Where Owls Know My Name

Faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyaaaaantastic! This one seals the deal. Despite some of my comments on the last few tracks amounting to a feeling of auditory exhaustion, this track slays in every way. The pretty vocals and clean guitars in the opening are a nice change of pace but then it opens into this chaotic mess that is paced perfectly.

Capricorn/Agoratopia

Sometimes the lyrics do the heavy lifting for a review… this one qualifies for that:

It's a pale facade
Hands stretching toward the last day
Beneath the sun
Reaching paradox, in time we will
Unmake ourselves
It's a pale facade
Secure in your right to remain
Breathing the air you did not earn
Like ants coveting

…well damn, I need a hug.

Conclusion: it’s a bop!

Not perfect but for someone like me who doesn’t always jive with hernia vocals, this is a band I can at least come back to and appreciate the hell out of the wacky as hell arrangements. I absolutely love the left field decisions they made with brass and string parts jutting in and out at random. Choruses breaking down and birthing completely new melodic sections of tracks and the complete disregard for genre tropes.

This is definitely an album that gets better with repeated listens as it can be difficult to approach for outsiders to the genre but it’s worthy of your effort. It did make me check out some of Nihils other work which I may revisit here in a future review. For now, let the river flow… or bleed.. or whatever your supposed to do while the saxophone playing gremlin is following you from the shore…