Nile ticket give away

Nile at Empire

South Carolina’s masters of death metal, Nile, are playing on Wednesday, March 6th, 2013 at Empire in Springfield, Virginia. On this tour Nile will be playing two full sets of songs spanning the band’s entire history to celebrate their 20th anniversary as a band. This show is not to be missed so DCHeavyMetal.com is going to give away a pair of tickets to one of you lucky readers. To enter, just leave a comment on this post telling me which song from Nile’s entire discography (see it here) you want them to play the most! What will you pick? Maybe Lashed To The Slave Stick or Black Seeds Of Vengeance or Unas Slayer Of The Gods? That song with the really long title that starts with the word Papyrus? Nile has so many classic songs to choose from! On Friday, March 1st at 5pm EST I’ll pick one lucky winner from all valid entries at random (using Random.org) to win the pair of tickets. Please don’t enter if you cannot attend, I want to make sure the winner gets to see this killer show. Be sure to enter with a valid email address you check regularly so I can contact you if you do win. Don’t worry, I won’t add you to any email lists or anything like that, I hate spam too. If I haven’t heard back from the winner in 24 hours another winner will be chosen. If you enter more than once then all of your entries will be disqualified. If the contest is over when you read this or you simply can’t wait to find out if you won the tickets you can buy tickets from Amped & Alive for $17 here.

Nile has bee playing their technical style of death metal, led by guitar virtuoso Karl Sanders, for 20 years now. In that time neither the band’s aggressiveness nor obsession with ancient Egypt have waned. You may remember Amon Amarth similarly performed two sets like this in 2011, however, they spent one of their sets playing their newest album straight through. Nile will not be doing that and instead will be playing a double set retrospective of their career. Nile has also made it clear that they want to support local musicians on this tour so they will have local bands playing each of these shows that will be different in each city. For the show at Empire we get Cannabis Corpse, a Richmond based death metal band with weed themed songs that parody famous death metal songs by bands like Cannibal Corpse, Morbid Angel and Deicide. The band features Land-Phil Hall of Municipal Waste fame on bass and vocals. There will also be sets by locals Mikhail and Acid Deth Kvlt (you can give them a listen by clicking on their names). Well check out these recent videos by Nile and Cannabis Corpse below and leave a comment with what song you want to hear Nile play the most in their retrospective set!

Review Of Hate Eternal gig at Jaxx

Disclaimer: I’ve been rather busy and also gotten sick since this concert happened so I’m not going to do a complete review of the gig, and it’s late getting posted too so deal with it. It was Friday the 27th of August and I went to Jaxx to see Hate Eternal, Cannabis Corpse and Order Of Ennead play. There were some local bands that played first, but I didn’t get there in time to see them. I did hear that a band called the Dead End Kids performed some rap and so many people left the main room because of this that that they were having a problem with crowding in the hallway.

I arrived at the venue a few minutes before Order Of Ennead played, which was good because I certainly wanted to see them again. They’re a Tampa, Florida based death metal band, and their drummer is Steve Asheim of Deicide fame. I’d seen them open for Deicide a while ago, but it was good to see them standing on their own this time. They played a tight set and I liked it more than the first time I saw them. Partly because I caught the entire set, and also because I think they’ve practiced a lot more and gotten their sound really down. I guess I mean their performance just seemed more professional and polished. In all, a brutal way to start of the night, and I mean that in the best possible way.

Next up was Cannabis Corpse, a sort of joke band from Richmond. Their song titles are all parodies of Cannibal Corpse songs, but changed to make them about smoking pot. For example Skull Full Of Maggots becomes Skull Full Of Bong Hits. That said, their songs are not covers or Weird Al style humorous lyric swaps, they’re more thrashy really. You may recognize their bass player, Philip Hall, from the band Municipal Waste, though the stand out on stage was vocalist, Andy Horn. Even though Cannabis Corpse was the band I was least interested in seeing, he was by far the most entertaining person on stage all night. He was almost constantly moving around, making strange and funny expressions and hand gestures, and even doing things like stumbling around like a zombie on stage. He really kept their set entertaining to me, and he was good at getting the pit going too. Going into the show I thought they should be playing before Order Of Ennead but I think they were a good fit between the two Florida death metal bands. They were a nice change of pace and kept the show from getting monotonous. And even though they weren’t headlining, they finished their set with an encore song, the rarely played live Chronolith (video below).

The next band set to play was the headlining act, Hate Eternal. The other Florida death metal act on the bill, this three piece band is technical and relentlessly brutal. Vocalist/guitarist Eric Rutan is probably best known for his time spent in Morbid Angel, but Hate Eternal is his own baby. Most of their songs aren’t particularly catchy, but then you don’t go to death metal shows to grind on sluts all night do ya? No, you go to hear fast, brutal tunes with insane solos and gutteral vocals so you can let off some steam in the mosh pit. Hate Eternal delivered big time this night, and though the crowd wasn’t by any means the biggest I’ve seen at Jaxx, there were enough people there that the place didn’t feel empty. The band didn’t move around a whole lot on stage, tho Eric would walk to the edge of the stage in a few choice spots and get right up in the audience’s face which seemed to get people excited every time. The band was really tight and really crushed it, especially on songs like I, Monarch and King Of All Kings. They were definitely worth seeing and my ears loved the pummeling.

Well, that’s about it for my “short” review which seems to have gotten to a decent length now. The people at Jaxx were cool and didn’t give me any gruff for shooting video this night, so I shot a lot. The guys in Order Of Ennead actually posted links to their MySpace and Twitter feeds of the vids I posted of them, which is cool. Well, on to the videos: