PRESS/A.SOLCA
As metal’s ‘nu’ millennium dawned, a certain breed of headbanger was feeling both alienated by mainstream trends, and dispirited by death and black metal scenes well past their prime. We’d already praised Ra for South Carolina’s Egyptophile death cult Nile after their stellar 1998 debut, Amongst The Catacombs Of Nephren-Ka, supported with relentless touring and fearsome word of mouth. Hopes and expectations were high, but when Black Seeds Of Vengeance exploded in the autumn of 2000 and we were flayed to the wall by its obsessive brute force, finally, death metal had a new scene leader. For Karl Sanders, Nile’s chief songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, guiding light and sole surviving founder member, it wasn’t just vindication for years of struggle, sacrifice and commitment, but also for the highly fraught process of making the LP itself.
Karl Sanders: purveyor of jaw-dropping intensity
PRESS/B. PEELE
“Nothing went to plan on that record,” Karl intones, in a sedate but cultured Deep South drawl, when Hammer interrupts him putting new riffs to new lyrics in his home studio. Occasionally, endearingly, he punctuates the end of a sentence by idly strumming a chord on an unplugged guitar. “We had spent many long months rehearsing the songs, and we were really over-touring, playing our hearts out, because this was our freaking chance, finally. After a decade trapped in South Carolina we were hungry, so we were playing our asses off.”
One brutal consequence of this Stakhanovite slog was that shortly before recording, drummer Pete Hammoura - Karl’s friend and bandmate for 10 years before co-founding Nile in 1993 - suffered a shoulder injury that would never fully heal. Determined to complete recording despite the pain, Pete spent two weeks working on drum tracks before facing the sad realisation that a replacement was needed. “That was really heartbreaking,” stresses Karl, still audibly bummed out by the memory. “Pete and I were best friends, we played in many bands - even dated the same set of twins! He’s like family to me, still is. But we were halfway through our allotted studio time, and instead of making a record in a month, we’ve now got basically 11 days to do everything. The money was running out, we were all broke, so we had to buckle down and work round the clock ferociously.”