Live Review: Rivers of Nihil - Club Academy, Manchester
8th March 2025
Support: Dååth, Cynic, Beyond Creation
Words: Dan Barnes
Photos: Rich Price
It’s the Club Academy’s turn to host a stop on Rivers of Nihil’s Aggressive Progressive tour; four bands, one stage, and more notes than the human mind can real get to grips with. The time for Music Theory for Dummies is over; it’s just a good job the Royal Northern College of Music is but a stones throw down Oxford Road.
There’s an early start for opening band Dååth, in from Atlanta, GA, with a long, twenty-year history of composing progressive, yet brutally fierce, death metal. Two-thirds of the band on stage tonight are post-Covid recruits, but that doesn’t blunt their ferocious assault. From the dissonant, near-Sonic Attack-style opening, through foundation-shaking volume, to the fetid atmosphere of a Georgian swamp, this sextet set the benchmark for the show.
Their use of overblown bombast would be replicated throughout the entirety of the evening, and it’s interesting to note the palpable differences between the more nuanced recent songs of their 2024 The Deceivers, opener No Rest, No End and its follow-up Hex Unending, with the “old school shit” like Subterfuge and Sharpen the Blade from the noughties-era. Those songs still carry the youth, boisterous and, dare I say it, a more naïve sense about them.
Canuks, Beyond Creation, from Montreal, play a set that seems criminally short, but in truth is the same length of time allotted to Dååth. At only four songs, these Canadians manage not only to mesmerise and hypnotise with technical prowess, but also to enrapture and engross through the sheer spectacle their music evokes.
The title track of the band’s most recent, 2018, record, Algorythm, blends elements of the melodic and the brutal; pig grunt vocals and heavy, pounding rhythm work compete with complex guitar passages. The multi-faceted nature of the music means we’re confronted by some dark, almost post-black metal moments, and then some incredible guitar virtuosity the next. All three of Beyond Creation’s albums to date are represented, taking the audience on a journey of ever-shifting rhythms and tempos, brutality and fragility, to come out the other end somehow irrevocably changed.
Los Angeles’ Cynic are one of the OG heavy progressive bands from the Eighties who decided to follow their own path through the ever-expanding extreme metal scene. Stylistic contemporaries of the likes Atheist, Death, Pestilence, et al, Cynic blazed a trail without which we would not have most of the bands on an ArcTanGent, Radar, or even tonight’s bill.
Lurgy has struck the Cynic camp, rendering vocalist Paul Masvidal with barely more than a painful sounding croak. He apologises to Manchester, turning the show into a largely instrumental one: “The notes tell the story, too” he reasons.
The show is taken from their four full lengths, paying particular attention on Traced in Air, the 2008 masterpiece that essentially lit Cynic’s touchpaper. Nunc Flames and The Space for This bookend the set, that is as much a recital as it is a concert. Aspects of intense progressive musicality, along with jazz-infused passages and even some coldly mechanical industrial moments give the performance a distance not felt from any of their three touring partners.
Out of Reading, PA, Rivers of Nihil are gearing themselves up to what might be their busiest year for some time; not only are they abound on a summer jaunt across the United States in support of their forthcoming, self-titled, new album, but they’ll be back on European soil for a couple of festival shows in August.
They start slow and heavy, then – bang! – it’s some of the heaviest beats heard all night. It’s enough to loosen fillings from your teeth, as soundwave after soundwave pass though unsuspecting bodies, causing untold disruption to biological processes.
The combination of the progressive with the technical is manna for Rivers…, with Brody and Adam continuing their mission to bamboozle as well and entertain with every song. Opening with newbie, The Sub-Orbital Blues and including recent single Hellbirds early on gives things an unfamiliar, though fresh, feel.
The Silent Life’s meaty chugs and cymbal crashes assures us all that there will be some fan favourites on offer tonight, though the smooth jazzy saxophone interlude is more the Norwegian Shining than Everyday Pox from Napalm’s Utilitarian album.
Each of the dozen or so songs aired tonight feels like a complete symphony in and of itself. A Home, Death is Real and Where the Owls Know My Name from the record of the same name, show a band comfortable endlessly experimenting with their sound; The Work’s Episode, The Void from Which No Sound Escapes and encore Clean are more polished progressive compositions, with the technicality still evident, even if the death metal aspects are toned down a little.
Rivers… have already issued single versions of, not only The Sub-Orbital Blues, but Criminals and House of Light, both of which make a showing tonight and will feature on the band’s late-May released record. All three new songs destined for the self-titled, give great confidence that Rivers of Nihil will be a contender come the end of the year awards.
If the mission accomplished tonight from these progressive musical warriors was to scramble brains, then it is accomplished; eardrums have been destroyed and faces melted. I’m going to have to read a book on String Theory when I get home just a switch off a bit – either that or watch people falling over on YouTube – all works the same!
Rivers of Nihil will be back on these shores in August at Bloodstock Open Air, sharing a Sunday stage with Gojira and Mastodon. I think I’ll pop into the RNCM and see if there’s a crash course on music theory I can take before that show.
Photo Credits: Rich Price Photography
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