Cumsleg Borenail - She’s Had Work Done

 Released: October 20

Cumsleg Borenail returns with another exacerbation of his penchant for the weird and grotesque with She’s Had Work Done. While the album art definitely leans in the grotesque direction, the album itself is actually kind of a mixed bag. Many of the pieces are guitar driven, by which I mean that guitar features heavily but don’t expect tight riffs or chugs. Instead the guitar serve as this weird accoutrement to the glitchy and sporadic nonsense that pervades the whole album. Things feel stretched out, warped, bent, and generally disconnected from any tangible reality. A few of them even contain vocals that were presumably generated with some variation of AI but these are far from unscathed by CB’s process of creative audio destruction. On the opening track the vocal start of sounding unhinged, pitch bent in ways that feel like a melting sensation as the sing on about some nonsense. 

Later on in the album, Borenail takes liberties with some percussive textures and heavy distortions. “Vulning Bristol” has these heavy and erratic pulses that bring a semi-industrial tone to the track, which is undermined creatively with a rather clean and twangy guitar strummed equally erratically. “Stench” keeps it going with something that sounds like there a slight bit of bluesy rock influence that was run through a garbage disposal along with last night’s dinner. As mentioned previously, this album is really a mixed bag. 

Having a great appreciation for a little creative destruction, I found She’s Had Work Done to be a pretty ear-catching body of work. It’s just so very all over the place in just about every track. It blends things together that otherwise sane people would never attempt and it does so in a way that doesn’t sound too out of place. Well, not out of place considering the context at least. Rest assured, it not easy listening but it is a rather creative approach to repurposing audio refuse that will leave you guessing.