Rating: 8.0

Country: Australia

Release Date: 2006

Record Label: Displeased

Track list:
1. Ast unTA AKSElin
2. VARJOutoMAA
3. JoenukkuMA-A lue
4. KulKU ISKA AJAn alla
5. PuhdASTRAALIvalo
6. MAgneTisOitUNut aIval
7. TULVI Alas keESIIN
8. AURAsh
9. SiE LUs tO


Band Website: Striborg

Striborg - Nefaria/Tragic Journey Towards The Light

Sin-Nanna - Everything

Somewhere in the unholy depths of Tasmania , there is a grim soul by the name Sin-Nanna, who's been conjuring up dread black metal since the early nineties. It's taken its sweet time, but now his current as well as older works are all emerging into the light, piece by piece. This double feature now under review contains one of his newest albums Nefaria, as well as his first demo album A Tragic Journey Towards The Light' from when Striborg was still called Kathaaria. The contrast between these two parts is rather large in execution, but thankfully not in spirit.

Starting out with Nefaria, the album opens with a storm of buzz saw guitars, eerie church-bell synths and white noise-like screeching. Thanks to the stellar production job (for black metal standards naturally, since this technically sounds utterly, delightfully horrible), the instruments on display sound tremendously ominous, with the guitar-layers fuzzed out to hell and back and spread out over the entire sound spectrum like some blanketing shadow, with the rest of the instrumentation (including the vocals), just barely standing out like grim silhouettes in the murky distance, against a bass-guitar backdrop which adds the necessary depth. The actual song craft sits somewhere in-between Burzum and Darkthrone, although with a very personal touch that makes this stand out from most other black metal acts with similar inspirations. It's really noticeable how isolated Tasmania must have been from the global scene for it to still sound so fresh and inspiring in practice, in spite of its theoretical adherence to the standard post second wave black metal template. The first few songs are relatively short (four to seven minutes) and employ a straightforward minimalism which, thanks to their reasonable length, do not overstay their welcome. They set an immediately effective atmosphere, ranging from gloomy oppression to wicked darkness (with the short "Garmonbosia" sounding especially sinister), and keep to that for a number of riff-cycles before transitioning into the next song. There are also two well-done ambient instrumentals that manage to sound interesting even though the synths sound pretty cheap. The final two songs of the Nefaria segment are two longer, more involved pieces, containing a greater number of variations and thus being surprisingly less minimalist than the earlier songs, despite their greater length. The closer "Black Apparitional Void" stands out especially for its significant speed and mood alterations during its playtime, starting as a superbly despondent near-ambient guitar-piece and eventually evolving into an insanely dark and harsh, fast-paced piece of droning extremity, after which it settles down into an echoing funereal ending of gloom and doom.

With Nefaria surpassing the forty minute mark, this could have easily been sold as is for full price, but as already stated this also contains the entire A Tragic Journey… demo which lasts about forty minutes as well. The style on this early demo (from '95 or thereabouts) is of course far less developed than on the recent Nefaria, with the reed-thin guitars flailing away every which way, accompanied by a particularly manic drum computer. The riffing of this demo is all over the place, changing around constantly with ‘fast' and ‘chaotic' being the operating descriptors here for most of its running time. The longer track "Palace in the Heart of the Forest" in contrast is more coherent and epic and nicely foreshadows the direction Sin-Nanna would take in the future. A few acoustic interludes break up the insanity from time to time and these are very effective, sounding appropriately mysterious and ghostly. While A Tragic Journey… is certainly an interesting glimpse into the origins of Striborg, it's probably a good thing it's included for free with the much stronger and more focused Nefaria, since this would not have stood up as a full-length on its own. But done this way it certainly adds extra value to the album, especially for its historical and nostalgic value, having that great underground spirit from the early nineties when black metal was still a mostly unknown and mysterious genre of music.

All things considered, Striborg is definitely a project to keep an eye out for. The Nefaria part of the album shows how a band in the style of Burzum and Darkthrone can still possess its own distinctive voice and be worthwhile even for black metal fans who might otherwise be tired of the glut of Burzumic Darkclones clogging up the airwaves, and the first Kathaaria demo is a very welcome extra, casting a glimpse into a time when ‘grim and true' were still descriptions that were not meant to ridicule underground black metal. These two albums pretty much showcase what black metal was and still is all about and are therefore recommended for anyone who has ever considered him/herself a fan of genuine black metal.

July 16th, 2007