Design of this CD looks a lot greater when you look at it with your own eyes than on photos. Very irregular design for a grindcore album. All this elegance of the artwork and simplicity of the colors looks more like a progressive rock. But don't be fooled with its sophisticated looks, 'cause this one can easily blow your head off!
While listening to Nil for the first time, first thought that came to my mind is "these guys surely grew as musicians". This album is a good pick for the fans of new-school American grindcore. I can't say that they got rid of death-metal style, it's still present here, but it is harmonized almost perfectly with sharp and aggressive grindcore parts. They chose the best songs from their demo and wrote some new songs and recorded it, 14 tracks overall. You can hear how good it was mixed and mastered. Because of that, this album sounds really good, can't still say that it's awesome and perfect, but definitely good. Vocals are fine, pretty generic, though, but you don't look for unusual vocals in grindcore, right? (Also it's pretty funny how he switched to typical black-metal crowling on 3rd song). There's a ton of cool diverse guitar riffs, which is pretty rare for old-school grindcore (but it's pretty obvious, remembering that they utilize all diversity from metal music). Rhythm section works beautifully here. Bass is not overly distorted, although not very distinctive in the mix. Drummer uses both grindcore blastbeats and death-metal blastbeats, there're also some parts with double bass drum (pretty death-metallic, if you ask me), sometimes you can hear some d-beat drums. It's obvious that Daggra tried to make this album more versatile, and, well, they managed to do it!
If you like Noisear, Discordance Axis, P.L.F., then you should give Nil a listen, there's almost zero chance you'll be left unsatisfied!
Rating: 7.5/10 Daggra
