“I know dance music when I smell it.”Karl Sanders, guitarist/vocalist for Egyptology-obsessed extreme metal outfit Nile, has some strong opinions about what is, and what is not, metal. And for him, the current crop of heavy-music radio success stories just doesn’t make the cut.
“Some of the stuff that’s pushed upon us, it isn’t really metal. It’s dance and pop music … shit, if I wanted to play James Brown music with loud guitars, we’d really have something danceable,” he says with a laugh. “But it would just be a bastardization of something that should not be perverted.”
Sanders is one of those folks for whom taste in music surpasses diversion to become an all-encompassing lifestyle. You find them in every edgy, anti-pop genre from metal to hardcore to Goth to techno. They stake their claim within the style’s landscape, adopt its tenets as their own and spend much of their lives exploring that environment. They delve far deeper than pedestrian or even dedicated fans, and those travels manifest themselves outwardly in language, dress, perspective.
They take their shit seriously. Sanders isn’t a closed-minded guy. He digs Peter Gabriel and much of the world-beat released on Gabriel’s Real World label. He probably likes a lot of other stuff, too. But when it comes to metal, where his heart and the bulk of his allegiance lie, one had best not fuck around.
“I know what it means. I know what it’s for,” he says. “Metal has an essentially rebellious spirit. It’s sort of the bonding together of the outcasts of adolescent youth … a focus for rebellion. It’s not about just having a cool groove and saying your rhymes. I just don’t see that as metal.”
No one is ever going to entertain the notion that Nile is “false metal.” Ever. Hyped by fans and the extreme-music press as death metal’s Great White Hope, the South Carolina-bred quartet combines the style’s most brutal, aggressive and technical elements with Middle Eastern atmospherics and a preoccupation with ancient Egyptian history and mythology.
The result not only fulfills the recommended daily doses of heaviness and jaw-dropping technique, but also draws in new ears harboring a yen for grindcore’s hyper-speed blasts, black metal’s horror-show orchestral ambiance and the intellectual lyrical musings of old-school thrash. Over the course of two full-lengths (with a third, the epic In Their Darkened Shrines, dropping Aug. 20), the band has built a sizable and disparate following. They’ve gone from opening for veteran first-wave holdouts like Morbid Angel to headlining their own tours. European metal fans, generally disdainful of American bands, have enthusiastically received the group.
Nile’s Egypt-centric lyrics and imagery have become synonymous with the band itself; that’s what happens when your group’s name succinctly states what you’re about. There’s plenty of gore to go around in Egyptian theology, and Sanders doesn’t lie awake nights worrying about the aesthetic overshadowing the music — in fact, he exhaustively details various lyrical topics in the foldout for Shrines.
He does bristle, however, when his lifelong interest is dismissed as little more than an angle, a shtick. “Early on, a few people flung accusations like that. I remember one time in particularly when somebody called us “the marketing invention of our record company.’ It’s pretty darn silly,” says the songwriter, in a voice that implies it’s a lot more. “The way the band came together, we’d given up all hope of getting anywhere, and decided we were gonna do what we wanted to, and the world be damned.”
As nu-metal acts have taken up residence on modern rock radio and TRL, extreme metal styles have enjoyed a resurgence under the radar, particularly overseas, but also here at home. Sanders acknowledges the idea that the latest commercial heavy-music boom is partly responsible, albeit in a backhanded way. By pushing a single style to ludicrous degrees of oversaturation, the media have sent adventurous pundits underground in search of something newer and harder; bands like Slipknot also act as a sort of “gateway drug” for metal neophytes.
“I’d agree with that,” he says. “The rap-dance-metal stuff, it’s … sometimes it’s kids’ first introduction to death metal, and they graduate onto more extreme forms. But I think real metal always needs something to rebel against, and now we have something new to crusade against — silly rap beats in metal.”
Those younger fans, the ones just now getting sick to death of nu-metal’s marketable angst and safe psychosis, hold the potential for an American death metal renaissance. But a lot of them are being denied exposure to live bands by dint of the promoters’ belief that extreme metal is for the over-21 crowd. Unlike underground punk, which boasts a long and storied tradition of staunchly all-ages venues, fringe-metal outfits are most often served up to a beer-swilling crowd at some sort of rock bar. Not every town’s got a State Theatre, where all-ages shows can still offer drinks to a sizable legal throng.
“A lot of times they’re turning away the under-18s, which I think is suicide,” carps Sanders. “I think a lot of your audience could be 16, 17 to 20. When I was that age I was already a metal fiend!”
He’s old enough to have been sampling extreme music when Death, Nasty Savage, Obituary and other Tampa bands were rearranging the face of underground American metal. Well-schooled in the touring life, Sanders has also undoubtedly met and played with any number of the Bay area pioneers who shaped his musical tastes and influenced his desire to make metal his life.
So does he get all excited and nostalgic when it’s time to swing south, to what was once billed as “the death metal capital of the world?” “I think the first 10 times I played in Tampa, I was thinking thoughts like that,” says the bandleader with a laugh. “Now it’s the kind of place where I see everybody I know.”
Music critic Scott Harrell can be reached at 813-248-8888, ext. 109, or e-mail him at scott.harrell@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Aug 7-13, 2002.
