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Striborg > Trepidation > Reviews
Striborg - Trepidation

Fucking Awful - 10%

Tenebrious, February 12th, 2008

Okay, I don't like this band at all. I can't fucking stand it, but I like to torture myself apparently. And this album surely is torture. I don't see what is so great or misanthropic about this band. It completely fails to invoke any emotion in me besides pure annoyance.

So, this shit-storm starts off with some of the most annoying drums I've ever heard. The blast beats are off-tempo and random. There is no variation. Ok, so the drums aren't so great, surely he must be really good at something else to make up for the lacking drums. But he isn't.

The guitars are terrible. They are extremely boring and repetitive. Repetition isn't really that big of a problem considering most black metal bands have a fair amount of it, but the guitar here is exceedingly boring. It doesn't paint a picture of darkness, it doesn't make me feel sad, and it doesn't sound hateful. It just sounds like a complete retard picked up a guitar and added loads of shitty distortion to it. It is actually painful to listen to.

Now onto the vocals... This guy must be joking. These are some of the worst vocals I've ever heard. Again, it sounds like a retard. It literally sounds like a retard screaming about some nonsense winter forests. I assume he was going for a style similar to that of Sterbend, Silencer, Lyrinx, etc., but he failed miserably.

There is nothing to say about the synths except that it sounds like he recently fell into a copy of FL Studio and mixed as many random shitty sounds as he could.

The inconsistent quality of the songs really annoys me too. Obviously this man lacks the knowledge to mix and produce. The volume of the guitar is too low, the vocals are too loud, one of the songs has the drums panned completely to the right, the reverb on the vocals is hilariously awful, and the list goes on and on. I realize that black metal is notorious for poor production, but this really needs to be heard to be understood.

Striborg is one of those bands that is amazingly awful. I've never heard anything good from this band. I'm well surprised to see how many albums he has released but considering the time frame one couldn't expect much more. The only reason why this gets a score at all is because Sin Nanna had the balls to release this piece of garbage.

Completely batshit insane!! - 75%

caspian, May 1st, 2007

Striborg is a band I wouldn't have heard of if it wasn't for Sunn O)))'s track Sin Nanna. Googling that name, I found out about this band, managed to track this album down, and give it a listen.

Suffice to say, I can probably split my life into two different eras.. Pre Striborg and Post Striborg.

I haven't heard anything this whacked out, this hateful ever, and I doubt I ever will again. The guitars are almost completely inaudible, just a thin layer of fuzz hovering over the rest of the mix, stripped of all clarity, almost a static buzz just floating in the mix, glaring hatefully at you. The drums sound impressively fake. Faker then the fakest drums you've ever heard, which is pretty impressive. The keyboards are oddly enough quite clear, and are also the most normal thing about this record, quite melodic and incredibly eerie.

Still, even though though that might sound pretty weird, it's not until all the elements are combined that you know you've got something really outside of the norm here. The blackened buzzing guitars, the keys that sometimes take over an entire song, the eerie, tormented vocals. Sin Nanna often favours a strange, screechy shriek over the usual Black Metal vocals, and in some places they're truely disturbing and strange, like in the epic Reaping the fields of Black Death. They're almost funny, they are just that outside of usual vocal technique. Completely odd and stunning.

Of course, all this weirdness wouldn't be too great if it wasn't for the fact that Striborg is a pretty damn good songwriter. The everlasting one.. Is all droney-ish, Dismal Snowset is slow, depressing and surprisingly beautiful, while Journey of a Misanthrope is straight out blasting black metal. Black Gaia is some strange, impenetrable droning ambient.. there's just weirdness everywhere in this album.

In the end, after listening to this album, I liked it. Kind of. There's no denying that Striborg is amazing. Definitely the most passionate music I've ever heard. In the end though, it's just too freaking weird. For fans of really demented black metal- everyone else will find this too weird to get into.

Continuing the hate - 95%

Taliesin, April 17th, 2006

Coming from Tasmania, this is Striborg's third album. Sin Nanna's talent for always creating music that seems different then before, whilst retaining a similar sound is deeply impressive. While the last release I heard from Striborg was "Black Desolate Winter/Depressive Hibernation" a collection of two newer demos, I have heard all of Striborg's other albums, and one other demo collection. "Trepidation" features a sound basically the same, but with some recognizable differences. The production features what I think are the first time showing of fake drums, unless of course he somehow managed to make real drums sound fake (a hard thing to do by the way). He pushed the drums up, to create a distorting aspect, while the guitars are given one of the thinnest, cruelest sounds I've ever heard. It's right up there with "Under the Sign of the Black Mark." In fact on the first black metal track "Journey of a Misanthrope" I can barely hear the guitars, for they are deeply pushed back, while the drums and keyboards are used as the primary instruments, and Sin Nanna's trademark vocals wail and scream with an unhuman feeling of total contempt.

Less depressive, and much more cruel then "BDW/DH" more similar to the ealier demos and the first album "Spiritual Catharsis" this album still features the refinement of the production that one could hear on his last few releases.
With cruel usage of black ambient and a cathartic hatred for the listener displayed by the production, Striborg has easily taken the place of the now totally defunct Ildjarn as being perhaps the most cruel and anti-human black metal band to create such music. Today, Striborg is one of the few bands to continue black metal's spirit and artistic relevance. However, like any great band, it is certainly not for everyone.