Nefaria / A Tragic Journey Towards the Light

Striborg pumps out releases like no other metal artist I've ever known. A Tazmanian misanthropic recluse hell-bent on making you feel his every dying miserable moment that festers inside of him. I mean, sure, it's understandable that deep in the woodlands of Tazmania, out in the middle of nowhere one is going to feel detached and alone and the artist that created this album is exactly that.

"Nefaria/Tragic Journey Towards the Light" is in my eyes one of the most poorly produced black metal albums ever made that has been released through a fairly prominent underground metal label. It isn't his worst produced album and that is sad. Sin Nanna will stop at nothing to convince you of this, even if it is over-exerting himself to make an album sound as distant as possible. I don't know how this was recorded but it seems as if he did it either with a cassette player/recorder or a really primitive 4-track recorder.

The drums are processed analogue style and sound very generic. They are way out of sync with the guitar parts. Best way to describe the drums is like early "Aske"-era Burzum but with a much more distant sound. Lots of snare used, very indistinguishable bass. The static from the bass drowns out the rest of the music.

The bass is non-existent. Of course a lot of black metal acts don't use bass guitar and I would say if Sin Nanna tried to incorporate bass into the music, it would be completely ruined; It would be complete noise.

What really saves this album is the vocals and guitar. Even though the guitar and drums are out of sync, the guitar rips. The structures are very advanced for depressive black metal. The riffs and structures are very intelligent and doom-laden. They kind of entrance you when the keyboards are going at the same time. The vocals are very minimal, there are no chorus-verse-chorus patterns, just kind of randomized. Sin Nanna has a very high pitched scream/rant and is very convincing of the message he is trying to send.

I'd recommend this album if your a Striborg fan and are familiar with his work. Once again, the only good thing about this is the guitar work and vocals and they are still very raw. So if your not a fan of raw depressive black metal and processors, I'd avoid this.

Noteworthy songs: "Black Apparitional Void", "One with the Night" and "Alone in Darkness".

By combining an old release "A Tragic Journey towards the Light" with new material under "Nefaria", the Tasmanian black metal act Striborg manages to span two extremes of just over ten years of its productive existence. (Probably in the mid-1990s Striborg was still trading under the old name Kathaaria but that's a minor detail.) The "Nefaria" section celebrates Striborg's 10th anniversary by opening strongly with the title track which is nearly all raging chainsaw guitar stomrs and heavily distorted vocals that sound much the same as the strings. Put away that lyric sheet and think of this song as a noisy blizzard soundscape - I find I enjoy it better that way myself and what better introduction to the rest of the album than to immerse yourself in Striborg's temperate rainforest storms and blizards.

"Permafrost forest" is an actual instrumental minimal drone piece which is a welcome contrast to the title piece and a breather for the following song "Somnambulistic nightmares" which is a solemn funereal piece with strong and memorable rhythms and majestic guitar riffing. I don't recall Sin-nanna having done this kind of doomy BM work before but with every recording he puts out he always does something new and different within his oeuvre. Again the singing is like a roaring storm but the song has sparse lyrics anyway. "Garmonbozia" is more familiar Striborg territory with the guitars taking a backseat to the singing and the lightning-speed drumming.

"Lament" is another ambient tonescape with percussion backing, a bit of an unusual combination and seeming a bit post-rock in that way. "Bleeding black tears of hate" starts off as another doomy piece with heavy echo on the distorted vocals but then suddenly goes completely loco with fast beats and woozy keyboards. This section lasts for some time before turning slow again. "Black apparitional void", the last track, is a mixture of sorrowful funereal BM doom and faster angry blastbeats with Sin-nanna's singing ranging from pained to embittered and angry as the pace of the song changes.

The next nine tracks are of the "A Tragic Journey ..." recording made in 1995; it'd be interesting to find out why Sin-nanna chooses to reissue his early material with new albums in this way. The contrast between the old songs and the new can be huge, and I don't just mean improvements in recording or in Sin-nanna's musicianship and song-writing over the years though they are very obvious on this album; in his current work Sin-nanna seems more world-weary and cynical about humanity, and this attitude certainly fuels and colours the mood, ranging from anger and hostility to despair, in a lot of his recent songs.

The early tracks have a lot more energy and aggression as you might expect of the young Sin-nanna, plus he was more reliant on a drum machine and his vocals had more feeling as well. Tracks like "One with the night" show a near-industrial side to Striborg that we don't see very much of. The songs tend to be more minimal in structure and are not as long as Striborg's current work so they meander less. Some of the singing can be experimental and I have the impression that Sin-nanna then was trying effects on his vocals for size and if he liked the results he kept them. Probably the best song here is "Palace in the heart of the forest" which is long and minimal with spidery guitars and speeding drum machine; as it progresses it can get quite trancey. Also included in this part of the album are acoustic guitar instrumental pieces which are parts 1 and 2 of "Drowned in black beauty".

Once again Striborg delivers a very substantial effort at nearly 80 minutes in length (that's longer than some movies with the advertisements and the opening and closing credits taken out) with music that can be demanding on the attention span, so much of it being varied in pace, mood and structure. I certainly get value for money whenever I buy a Striborg album!

This is a strange one to review. I am sorely tempted to pan it, but I won't, and I've given it a fair score.

There are two CDs on one here, the first, it is claimed, was recorded on an analogue 4 track in '06, the second was recorded in '05 in circumstances unknown.

I am going to speculate that those circumstances involved a dictaphone, a van loaded up with a crap drum machine and guitars, and a sky dive. The sound quality is *truly* horrendous. That said, as with the first half of the the CD, there are a few ambient tracks to be found, and these are free of the 'production' problems.

Now, I'm going to forgive the mess on the later half of the disc and talk about the first half. Its pretty damn good and positively dripping with gloomy atmosphere. Not only is the sound evil as you like, but its also rich with a morbid and melancholy atmosphere of considerable potency.

The first part of this CD contains great mid-paced riffs, grim trem picking, real drums (of both the cacophonous and pounding variety), and spectacular vocals - and all of these things are swimming in a sea of reverb powered otherworldly misery.

As previously noted, there are some ambient tracks here too, and they're good.

"Bleeding black tears of hate" is my pick for album highlight, and not just because its a fine song title.