Striborg is a one-man Tasmanian black metal band. No kidding. Signed to Southern Lord after being on the scene's fringes for almost a decade issuing his own demos and homemade CDs, this wonderfully weird set of dark forest tunes combines two releases by Sin Nanna (named for a Sumerian crescent moon god), Striborg (the god of winds in Slavonic mythology), his latest release Embittered Darkness, and his 2003 title Isle de Morts. And if you're wondering where you've heard the name Sin Nanna before, it's because the opening track of Sunn 0)))'s Black One, which is named after him: yep, they're bona fide fans. Striborg is obsessed with forests, the cold, misanthropy, isolation, and desolation. Unlike the familiar corpse grinding or heresy that usually tops the lyric lists of black metallers, Striborg's music is wonderfully messed up. It's ultra lo-fi, full of the thinnest drum sounds ever, the tempos are slow on Embittered Darkness, Striborg's vocals are spat out in a rasp that sounds like Donald Duck trying to sing like Jesse The Body Ventura. But it works as some of the creepiest, strangest, most out-there music ever to pass for metal. There's that buzzy hiss everywhere in his songs, it takes up the entire middle. It sounds like filtered noise. Then there are keyboards played so amateurishly, one wonders why their sound is so compelling. But that's the thing: it's all utterly compelling, addictively so. You'll find yourself reaching for this when no other record will do. Isle de Morts, the earlier album, is placed second here; it's is more traditionally fast but just as thin, with the vocals being completely off-kilter, out of time, in the space way up in front of the instruments. One is reminded of Darkthrone for a moment, but the skew is just so off that you forget it as soon as you encounter that notion. You will cherish every last tortured gargle of a syllable, and find yourself looking forward to your next spin of this mixed up, screwed up, gloriously wonderful mess of a record. The song titles? You already know them: Protagonist of Misanthropic Virtues, Wrapped in a Cocoon out of Harm's Way, In the Eerie Pre-Dawn Silence of the Cold, The Cold Slumber That Awaits Me, Landscapes of Mist Casts Across the Steel of Cold, and so on. All of that said, this is a necessary purchase for fans of true black metal and especially for those of its more extreme, marginal acts Dead Reptile Shrine, Hidden, and Lugubrum. Amazing.