Smoleńska by Bornwithhair

REVIEWS

"Emotions and movements anarchically crash together within each track. The band utilise just about every resource in distortion and synth, and compact their sounds into dense and ever-changing layers. At over an hour, the album’s narrative is epic. It contains all the progressive hallmarks of the bombastic colliding with the peaceful... The musicianship and composition is, without doubt, extremely well orchestrated. The depth and layers contain uncountable treasures, and atmospherically, it is as deep and explosive a plummet into the human psyche as one can hope for." — Everything Is Noise

"Smoleńska is a staggering piece of creative lunacy... If Bornwithhair can focus this almost ridiculous level of creativity, so their work has more clarity, then they could be on to something really special. I get the feeling that this album is a stepping stone towards something really special, a learning experience that they needed to go through before they can reach their potential. This may be the band learning their craft before releasing an album that will be seen as a classic. Personally I can’t wait to hear what they do next." — Musipedia of Metal

"This wonderful creation is Bornwithhair’s second release this year. A metal album born out of a DIY aesthetic it’s been much played here over the past month or so… What keeps me coming back is how unhinged it is, like a black metal Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter in some ways, totally out there, never predictable, always engaging." — Vogon Laundromat / I Heart Noise

"It is a fucking treat." — Fistful of Doom

"Smoleńska is avant-garde music that is very different from the norm... an apocalyptic feel." — Heavy Music Headquarters


THE BAND

Bornwithhair is an Avant-garde Metal band hailing from the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. While grounded in a cacophonous form of heavy music incorporating elements of the Black, Death, and Sludge varieties with a hint of Industrial, the band’s sophomore album, Smoleńska, draws on the history of Metal while connecting with and combining facets of Noise, Psychedelia, Freak Folk, and Free Improvisation.

At the core of Bornwithhair are the duo of multi-instrumentalists Weirding and Jean Farraige. Known for a strictly DIY approach, the pair recorded and produced the new album themselves in a 19th century Maryland farmhouse along the river that spills into Baltimore Harbor.


THE ALBUM

Featuring protracted song lengths, non-traditional compositional structures, cut-up studio techniques, and nearly as many subdued acoustic guitar figures as crushing riffs and flailing electric guitar solos, Smoleńska nonetheless has a feeling that should be familiar to fans of underground metal. “The goal wasn’t to alienate the listener through the use of these extended techniques,” said Weirding, “But rather was to create a unique and cohesive sonic world into which the listener could disappear as if being immersed into a movie.”

Having released a pair of singles in 2019, the duo issued a well-received debut album called Radical Moon in early 2020.

"Radical Moon is one of the most unsettling (and compelling) avant garde releases heard in some time... This is a record that requires (and deserves) repeat listens. It’s Big Black, but if Steve Albini had been locked in the Unabomber’s cabin." — Astral Noize

The new full-length has the earmarks of a concept album while maintaining the uncompromising lo-fi and homemade aesthetic that characterizes the band’s earlier work. That aesthetic, which exploits rough-spliced edits, disembodied and incongruous voices, and cheap microphones, helps ground Bornwithhair’s music in an historical space populated by mutant studio manipulators and outsider sound engineers.


THE SONGS

The songs on Smoleńska tell the impressionistic and allusive story of a young artist and her design of a simple emblem that will become synonymous with the heroism and tragedy of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. “The story of the Uprising itself tends to be something that is either ignored or told as some sort of jingoistic fantasy where everyone’s a hero,” said Weirding whose songwriting often uses historical events as a starting point. “We wanted to use it as a way to explore some complex sensibilities about place, purpose, and the emotional toll of committing to a cause.”

The new album’s historical allusions, art-house approach, and unrelenting parade of dark lyrical images may not suit the fancy of every listener. But they do conjure a hellish literary vision of resistance and death situated before the fiery backdrop of a war-ravaged city. “This album is not a collection of short stories,” said Farraige. “It is a novel.”

Smoleńska will be released on Bandcamp as well as on the major streaming services on September 11, 2020.

Contact: weirding@bornwithhair.com

For more info, see: https://bornwithhair.com/

Arthouse Metal

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