SIBIIR are from Norway. They like black metal. And Siberia. So what kind of music do you expect? Doomy, glistening sounds? Or explosive, harsh shredding? Well, SIBIIR are neither, performing neither doom nor chaos.
Their style of music might not be as “sophisticated” as for example the obnoxious Tool but at the same time they are not as animalistic as Kvelertak, it is more of a blackened hardcore and interestingly it can show you very well what that terms really means or should mean.
The five-piece from Oslo have no problems in displaying muscular grooves pumping hardcore irons at the gym nor showing their metal likes with ripping up some songs with scratching guitar lines to show that they want to ride on two skateboards at the time – downhill! Usually this amalgam of two genres is pretty hard to balance but SIBIIR are really good at it and can definitely be regarded as one of the few bands to do justice to both parts of the genre – black metal and hardcore. On their second full-length out on Fysisk Format they are able to show a greater sense of songwriting and compiling a coherent album as the songs are not only really good in a way that they are not superfluously long and also not spastically short. The way the songs are arranged within the album context is really good and with some songs seeping in a bit of doom while others being pure distorted hardcore there is a good deal of dynamics going on in those 41 minutes.
The hardcore part is also audible (or rather readable) in the lyrics; a charge against the capitalists today sucking out the bone marrow from the working classes and ignoring the sparks leading up to a bottom-down-up-revolution (in “For the Few”); a repent that we all participate in destroying this planet of ours and that no one, really no one is innocent and yet no one is doing anything but staring (“The Silent Repent”).
One cannot but be impressed by this record because it blasts you away with lots of raw power and yet never tries to pull you down into depression – the only thing that shall be pulled away are the shades preventing us from seeing some of the most urgent problems of our day and age.
