On Saturday, January 23rd, I had the privilege of going to see the gods of extreme death metal, South Carolina’s Nile, at Station 4 in St. Paul. For all the indie kids who comprise the bulk of the Wake’s readership, going to see Nile would be the equivalent of you going to see Wilco or Yo La Tango or something—Nile is a band widely regarded by metal aficionados to be at the top of their genre. Live, they are stunningly tight: they flawlessly replicate songs from six albums, material spanning over a decade (including last year’s Those Whom The Gods Detest, a punishing return to form after the minor whoopsiedaisy of 2007’s Ithyphallic).

Nile has been absolutely ruining skulls since 1993 with their highly technical brand of death metal. Off-meter blast-beats set the foundation for six-string acrobatics that would make those Shadows Fall lightweights drop trou and shamefully expose their puffy shredless labia. Nile’s guitar solos have been known to cause spontaneous, party-clearing air-guitar sessions, often climaxing in torpedo-esque dive-bombs that quite simply create erections. Nile is further differentiated from their oafish death metal brethren by frontman Karl Sanders’ cerebral lyrics, centering on rites of ancient Egyptian antiquity. Both technically and intellectually, there is unquestionably more to Nile’s brutality than the run-of-the-mill death metal conventions.

However, seeing such eminence in the flesh I was struck by the shtick and limitations of Nile’s genre—halfway through the set I realized that I had seen this all before: a violent, smelly moshpit full of flatlining brainwaves; masturbatory, cookie-cutter inter-song banter; shirts for sale that actually say CAN YOU HEAR US… DEATH TO JESUS; musicians’ faces full of disingenuous anger, as though they aren’t incredibly lucky to be able to travel the world making fucking music.

As quality as Nile’s music is, death metal is a stale genre, as this show reflected. If you want music to engage you technically or to genuinely scare you (a pretty epic “if”), there are a number of heavy bands worth listening to that don’t follow the worn-out death metal formula (1349, Genghis Tron, and Converge all come to mind). But in the end, any night that involves an entire room full of people yelling “CAST! DOWN! THE! HERETIC!” gets a big ol’ hell yeah in my book.