Rivers of Nihil – Rivers of Nihil – Album Review

27th May 2025 0 By Jon Deaux

I need to anchor myself, but there’s nothing—nothing-no weight, no tether, just this album bleeding through the prep room speakers like it’s aware of me. My hands won’t stay still. They’re not my hands. I keep looking at them, and they’re doing things without me. Typing. Clenching. Floating?

Adam Biggs is singing and I swear he’s inside the wall—his voice is coming from the drawer labeled Peterson, M. I didn’t label that drawer. I haven’t prepped Peterson yet. Did we even get a Peterson? I should check the lo,g but I can’t move. I’m sitting on the linoleum, and it’s soft, like muscle. Like flesh under pressure. I hope I remembered to put the eye caps in, Mr. Lacey. His lids kept slipping open last time I looked.

“Sub-Orbital Blues” starts, and my breath gets tangled. Four in, four out. The old trick. But Klein’s drumming is crawling up my spine like centipedes. Every snare hit lands in my jaw. It’s not music. It’s Morse code. It’s telling me something. I just don’t know what.

Andy Thomas is playing two guitars. I know that’s not possible, but he is. I can see it. One neck rests on his shoulder, the other wrapped around his waist like a spine. And he’s singing through his teeth. They fall out every few bars, and he swallows them without missing a note.

The lights flickered just now. Or maybe my eyes did. Doesn’t matter. The fluorescent hum syncs perfectly with the bassline. It’s comforting, until I realize it’s in a frequency I shouldn’t be able to hear.

“House of Light.” Brody Uttley said it’s the centerpiece of the album, but to me it’s just a corridor. I walk down it every time the chorus hits. Door after door, all of them ajar, and in each one, there’s a version of me prepping the wrong body. The wrong clothes. The wrong face. One’s crying. One’s laughing. One doesn’t have a mouth.

There’s a cello now, or is that the embalmer humming? No—Patrick Corona is playing saxophone in the corner of the room. He nods at me when I look over. I nod back. He vanishes.

I swear to God there’s blood on the floor, but it won’t stay in my vision. Every time I blink, it changes shape. Becomes writing. Something about rivers, something about time. I stopped reading the Bible when I realized I was starting to recognize the names in the obits.

“American Death.” No symbolism there. Just the facts. Dead air. Dead parents. Dead ends. It stomps in on distorted hooves. I scream and it comes out as laughter. The drain in the corner is humming the bridge riff. I don’t know if I ever cleaned it.

I’ve lost track of time. I think we’re past the forty-minute mark. Or maybe it’s been forty years. The walls are sweating. My teeth feel soft. The title track begins, and suddenly I’m standing. I don’t remember standing. I’m pacing in circles. There’s a second shadow following me slightly out of sync. I think it’s mine from yesterday.

The lyrics are about holding on to light, but all I see is the embalming machine dripping like it’s crying. I want to unplug it. I want to plug myself into it, and MAYBE drain whatever this feeling is and replace it with pink fluid and silence.

No album has ever made me feel this seen and this watched at the same time. The band has settled into their new selves. I feel like I’ve scattered into three people wearing my skin wrong. None of us knows where we left the forceps.

But it worked. The panic didn’t win tonight. I think. The album distracted the thing in my chest. Or maybe it fed it. Maybe it made it smarter.

I listened through the entire thing without gouging my eyes out or screaming into a drawer. I’m going to mop the blood that isn’t there now. Then maybe I’ll sleep under the prep table again.

Score 7.5/10
Track List