Now in stock on vinyl, this edition of My Firstborn Will Surely Be Blind comes from Aurora Borealis in a thick slipsleeve jacket with a printed inner sleeve, on black vinyl in a limited edition of 600 copies.

Finally got this in stock for anyone who's missed out so far, and if you're into the blackened otherworldly weirdness of Dead Raven Choir, it shouldn't take much to convince you that this is another amazing and essential album from the man known as Smolken. This is grim, grim, grim, and I wouldn't even call it a black metal album, although My Firstborn Will Surely Be Blind is certainly quite blackened, and definitely HEAVY, in it's own weird lumbering way. You might expect this to sound like the weird folk-flecked and ultra-distorted black buzz that was Cask Strength Black Metal, but this album is totally different. It opens with the plodding, almost industrial dirge of "Kigi Wa Haru", and immediately the sound is different, a pounding lurching doomy march surrounded by clanging metal and scorched raspy vocals and incredibly distorted folk melodies, slow and haunting and creepy as fuck. It's almost more like the damaged blackened folk-dirge of his other band, Wolfmangler, but much more noisy and freaked out.

And that�s what makes the fact that this is another collection of cover tunes all the more surprising. Rendered into grisly new shapes through Smolken's twisted damaged black metal lens, a bunch of different traditional folk, country and popular songs from such artists as Townes Van Zandt, Neko Case, Richard Thompson and Cole Porter, a strange mix of artists for sure, and the selection becomes even stranger as you make your way through the album. All of the songs are mutated according to Smolken's brand of ghoulish blackened dirge, the original melodies obscured by massive distortion, the rhythms gnarled and warped, slowed to a clanging creep, the lyrics spat back out in a filthy blackened croak. The tunes are so brutalized and corrupted that it gets pretty tough to recognize the songs, even if you're familiar with the originals. The song "From The Stars", originally by the New Zealand drone artist G. Frenzy, is morphed into a gasping funeral-folk nightmare, Neko Case's "Favorite" becomes skeletal noise-scorched doom, and that blistering opening track "Kigi Wa Haru" is actually from the Japanese psych-folk guitarist Kazuki Tomokawa. And like his Wolfmangler project, there are no guitars used, just bass and bass fiddle, which somehow Smolken manages to make it sound like a demonic cello, every groaning buzzing note soaked in sorrow and misery. Creepy, heavy and weirdly beautiful...