Striborg — Solitude
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.