Pennsylvanian death metal quintet Rivers Of Nihil’s new release, The Conscious Seed of Light, is nothing overly special. Although every member of the band is obviously extremely talented, with the absolutely fantastic guitar riffs and solos, the unbelievably fast double bass drum, deep bass you’d feel in your gut in a live environment and the deep clear screams, there is just only so much you can do with death metal before you are repeating yourself and unfortunately that’s what happens in this album.
Rain Eater is the first song on the album with vocals, as the song before, Terrestia 1: Thaw, is an instrumental track that truly shows off the bands skill, speed and precision. Rain Eater has one of the strongest guitar solos on the album and really shows off the creativity of the guitarists, Jon Kunz and Brody Uttley. The song Birth of Omnisavior shows that Jake Dieffenbach, the screamer, has a huge lung capacity and an intense talent for screaming as he pulls off so impressively long, deep screams that will make you shiver due to the man’s sheer talent. The slower song Soil & Seed is one of the most different-sounding on the album because it’s not horrendously high paced.
The album is very dark and will most likely get boring after a few listens. There isn’t a point as to when one song starts and another song ends if you aren’t listening intensely, as the songs all sound quite similar. They’re a talented bunch of guys for sure, but their songwriting ability definitely has room for improvement.
6/10
