Black Bordello’s second album White Bardo embodies a state of welcome oblivion for the band’s founder and songwriter Sienna Bordello. These songs mark a point of surrender; to the laws of nature, to love as an unquenchable sovereign entity, to profound notions of divinity, mythology and quantum physics, to the rush of mortality. Moreover, on White Bardo Black Bordello looks way beyond what we encounter at face value.
Black Bordello have built a steady grassroots following since their formation, allowing them to bend their live shows to their own distinct sensibility – a rallying against the way bands are often treated, as something interchangeable slotted in to bring in patrons. So in March 2024, the band introduced Black Bordello’s Chaos Cabaret, an event that sold out Paper Dress Vintage. It showcased musical performances, clowning, set design, theatre and poetry.
The group’s lauded self-titled LP – featuring singles “Backache”, “Drones” and “Leeches” – expressed Sienna’s piercing reflections on sexuality, society and womanhood. White Bardo sucks all the gravity out of the room, veering her songwriting towards a more exploratory outward-looking angle. Lead single “Nunhead” (named after the famous cemetery in Southeast London, where many of Sienna’s family members are buried) masquerades its simmering fatalism with a joyful saunter, as Sienna observes the bizarre polyphony of leisure and loss. Writing the song during the pandemic, the sight of mums drinking Prosecco and kids playing with toys left on other children’s graves struck a strange chord.
White Bardo brims with likewise cheeky energy, a flood of stubborn rejoicing that washes over feelings of despair and numbness. “Acid Mary” pushes and pulls listeners between allure and austerity, rapturously yielding itself to the forces of nature. The carnivalesque “Love Is A Joke” and the grandiloquent British Invasion-indebted “Smoke & Hiss” are both blunt and debonair in their testimonials of love and heartbreak.
“It’s a positive escape route that came about from negative occurrences. After failed therapy sessions, I learned Transcendental Meditation, Tibetan Buddhism, the Book of the Dead and started reading the Bhagavad Gita and essays on quantum physics. These texts as well as being in situations where I witnessed death first hand caused me to wonder about the temporary nature of this reality. It’s true that in hospices they know about the Bardo because they see people enter it and stay there for weeks on end. Neither dead nor alive. And sometimes in that space we see truly phenomenal things occur. You could enter it any time just by settling your mind. The Bardo is not a morbid place but rather a waiting room or an emancipatory space. Some things may have to end, but joy lies in the fact that more things come then begin.”
Indeed, White Bardo is Black Bordello’s concentrated attempt to unshackle from the obvious beaten paths, exploring alternative vantage points with an open-heart and a pinch of ink-black wit. One could even call it Sienna’s default state, recalibrated anew: growing up with roots in Cyprus and Sicily, she was exposed to Mediterranean and Middle-eastern musical styles before her interest in popular music came into play.
Brandishing a vocal background in both opera and pre-war jazz music, different art forms and belief systems were always willing participants of the same dramaturgical dance. With a life lived ‘left-off-centre’ from quote unquote normalcy, one can design a pocket universe where all that shapes you can finally make sense.
