History
Reviews
STRIBORG – EMBITTERED DARKNESS/ISLES DE MORTS – SOUTHERN LORD 
To call the guitar tone on this album “blurry” as the band’s biography does is to be gracious, generous and indeed unkind to all blurry guitar sounds out there. What passes here as the guitar sound is akin the sound of flies buzzing around a week-old fruit. Production values being non-existent the attention necessarily turns to the songs, which is soon determined to have a value analogous to the production. In other words, real songs are nowhere to be found.
There has been a rash of underground black metal releases with wicked vocals, lo-fi sound and black and white design out on the market in the last couple of years, but nary a one has been as blatantly crap as this embittered anti-value for money. The band has apparently included an old demo, called Isles De Morts, as a ‘bonus’ on this disc, yet determining the transition between the recordings is impossible. The band deserves 20 points for amusement value and how (at least) it skips the usual K&F trend, but on every level Striborg is comatose unfortunately. – Ali “The Metallian”
STRIBORG – AUTUMNAL MELANCHOLY – DISPLEASED 
There are several paradoxes intrinsic to Striborg. The band is based out of Tasmania, but has an album describing ‘autumn.’ The main man is named Sin Nanna, which is a Sumerian name, but the band hails from the other end of the world. The biography, and I quote, notes that there will be “no contact. No interviews,” but of course the band has a MySpace page – really pathetic this one. Of course, the “Aussie black metal band” spends most time in ambient mode.
Hypocrisies aside, Striborg’s Autumnal Melancholy is droning, noisy, grrrim and dark tormented music from hell. Focusing little on riffing or instrumentation, the man in charge puts all his attention towards achieving the desired atmosphere. The use of creepy keyboard and sci-fiesque synthesizers notes especially on the second part of this disc are more pronounced, while the clicky drum sound is only partly compensated by the downright wicked screams that must have emanated from the larynx of a bewitched crow. None of these descriptions are an exaggeration perhaps. One just wishes the boy band had skipped the stupidity of having a MySpace page. – Anna Tergel
STRIBORG – THE FOREBODING SILENCE – DISPLEASED
Ambient black metal is what this is mainly known as, but lo-fi noise is also another possible description. Sin Nanna continues to churn out release after release and long minutes after long minutes of torment. It is always going to be difficult to associate such Burzum-esque music and imagery, provided with the CD, with Australia. Neither do titles like Lonely Walk In A Desolate Cold Pine Forest and My Journey Through Hills And Paddocks. The Foreboding Silence presents 11 songs which are actually five songs interspersed in between two intros, three ‘intervals’ and an outro. The movie sample type intervals do not necessarily go along with the agonized vocals, sporadic raw riffs and overall ambience either. As Sin Nanna himself one must surely be in another state of mind to be able to appreciate Striborg. – Anna Tergel
Interviews
|
