Top Bar
Musique Machine Logo Home ButtonReviews ButtonArticles ButtonBand Specials ButtonAbout Us Button
SearchGo Down
Search for  
With search mode in section(s)
And sort the results by
show articles written by  
 Review archive:  # a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

Striborg - Solitude [Displeased Records - 2007]

Solitude finds Striborg’s particular and distinctive brand of black metal at it’s most dreamy, ghostly and doomy. Fitting perfectly the albums title this is deep, dark and chillily ominous, really solitude it’s self distilled into bizarre and nightmarish audio cocoon that you can fold your self into far away from the world around you.

The album pace is deliberately slow, hazy and drifting with its mix of foggy and ghostly low grade keyboard ambience explorations and black metal craft that doesn’t really getting much above a slow macabre waltz or blacked metallic slow jog, but more often crawls along at a die mans pace as the cold guitar darkly and frozenly chime  sliding out their morose and pained melodies. And of course Sin Nanaa black metal bellow and call which seems a  lot more haunted if a little less varied this time around, it seemingly mixing in and out of the slow moving and grim soup of sound. The instruments seem less distinct too  often melting and blurring into each other so your not sure were one ends and the other begins-the whole album seems covered in this hazy, fogged coating like sonic shadows.

Really this is most conducive and effective in its grim spell as a 70 minute album, but a few worthy mentions come in the form of ; Pernicious Paths of Perception which starts off with quite up-beat darked metallic wall of guitar sound before dropping into this strange blacked harmonic waltz of keyboards and guitar sounding like strange grim easy listening music. The Grandeur of Melancholy with it’s icy reverb coated guitar tones that pierces you  feeling like  down turned and doomed metallic music box that spiralling down and down it’s melodies. With Sin Nanaa grim moan smearing into the guitar sound and later some haunting piano/ organ that also follows the tracks harmonic decline.

An album that thoroughly locks you into a smothering and lightless vibe so you do feel like your eternal wondering through darkened and out of focus woodland.  But also Solitude has some surprisingly  black harmonic traces and clever experimental sonic touches too.

Rating: 4 out of 5Rating: 4 out of 5Rating: 4 out of 5Rating: 4 out of 5Rating: 4 out of 5

Roger Batty
Latest Reviews

Striborg - Solitude
Solitude finds Striborg’s particular and distinctive brand of black metal at it’s most dreamy, ghostly and doomy. Fitting perfectly the albums title this...
080226   400 Lonely Things - Creature ...
060226   PBK & Howard Stelze - She Thi...
060226   Wilt - Mold The Earth
060226   Andreas Rönnquist - The Fou...
060226   Vampire Zombies…from Space ...
060226   This Is What I Hear When You ...
060226   Niacinamide - The Eyes Of Ages
060226   Aberdeen Abattoir - Only Pain...
050226   Crash And Burn - Crash And Bu...
050226   Visitors from the Arkana Gala...
Latest Articles

Crude ‘n’ Hope-corroding Wall...
Back in 2024, I got my first taste of Absurd Reality, and I was so impressed by how crude and nasty its take on walled noise was. Behind the project is South...
290126   Crude ‘n’ Hope-corroding ...
231225   Creepy Images Books - Killer Art
221225   Best Of 2025 - Music, Sound &...
041225   The Spectral Sounds of The Pr...
281025   Michael Hurst Interview - Unb...
071025   Xiphos - The Rise And Fall Of...
030925   Third Window Films - A Label ...
130825   HNW fest- Barcelona- 12th Apr...
250725   Raté interview - Walled-in F...
180625   Matthew Holmes - Of razor-sha...
Go Up
(c) Musique Machine 2001 -2025. Twenty four years of true independence!! Mail Us at questions=at=musiquemachine=dot=comBottom