FIVE FAVOURITES: Bonnie Trash

Finding comfort and catharsis in the darker spheres of life, Canadian-Italian twin siblings Emmalia and Sarafina Bortolon-Vettor create music inspired by everything from Italian folklore to the gloom of post-punk. Performing under their moniker Bonnie Trash, the duo have recently released their deliciously droney debut album, Malocchio, which translates as “hex” or “curse”. Inspired by the stories that their grandma Nonna Maria handed down to them as children, their record is a potent and commanding blend of metal, shoegaze and gothic rock, released via aptly named label, Hand Drawn Dracula.

We think one of the best ways to get to know a band is by asking what music inspired them to write in the first place. We caught up with Bonnie Trash to ask about their “Five Favourites” – five albums that have inspired their song-writing techniques. Check out Emma & Sara’s choices below and listen to their new album, Malocchio, here.

1. The Smashing Pumpkins – Gish
Sara: When I was a teenager, around 13 or 14 years old, I was emotional as all hell and needed to release my sadness, my anger – it’s like all of a sudden I was finally feeling everything all at once. I was just beginning my journey into 1990s grunge like Soundgarden, Nirvana, and Alanis Morisette. Then I heard, ‘I Am One’ by The Smashing Pumpkins and it blew my mind. It was loud, heavy, and had hints of heavy metal. That drum opening drew me right in and I became an instant fan of Jimmy Chamberlin. At the time, I was solely playing the drums. I didn’t even think about singing until I was around 16. As I listened to Gish on repeat for a few years, it didn’t take long until Billy Corgan’s lyrics and voice seeped into my bloodstream, and inspired me to sing and write. There are truly painful, sad, and quiet moments on this album, and they are almost always followed by dramatically explosive arrangements. I instantly fell in love.

2. The Jesus and Mary Chain – Darklands
Sara: This album is a post-punk gem. It’s gorgeous. Those smooth, noisy, yet soft grooves that make you want to slow-bop along to it all – it’s pure bliss. There’s a sensitive nature to this record, and it bleeds out through the vocals and lyrics, backed up by pop-sensibilities. The drums hit hard and are super robotic, as the guitars float on top. Darklands sparked my love for drum machines and electronic percussion. And the lyrics? They’re macabre, sad, dark, and at times joyous: “And I awake from dreams, to a scary world of screams.” Combining these contrasting lyrical themes are beautifully-haunting. What’s so cool about this record is that it’s got this overall bubblegum pop sound. Darklands continues to inspire my love for electronic drums, writing pop-structured songs, and singing about dark subject-matter in a (sometimes) joyous way.

3. Godspeed You, Black Emperor – Yanqui U.X.O 
Emma: I encountered this album after a hard drive swap with my bandmates/friends about 10 years ago. I religiously listened to my iPod on shuffle to hear how songs were related to each other. ‘Motherfucker = Redeemer’ came on and my world was transformed. It slowly repeated and grew in intensity, yet gave so much sonic space for emptiness to shine. This album forever changed my guitar playing. It made me want to expand on noise and texture while keeping everything I wrote simple enough to be repeated, droned, and transforming. I changed the way I use a slide and it made me pick up a bow. Yanqui U.X.O is the soundtrack of major horror and disaster, telling a story of how deep our formations of capitalist structures eventually funnel into the corporate hands of bomb making and war-feeding. It tells the tale of how the little things really do add up.

4. Nine Inch Nails – And All that Could Have Been
Emma: This is more of a recent discovery and a moment of excitement in re-igniting a creative spark. I’m not normally into listening to live albums but this one is exceptional– the 2000 Fragility 2.0 tour that took the world by storm. In this sonic capture, you can hear every instrument in its live element embodying the heaviness of each song with even more depth; you can feel everything vibrate and sense the sweat. This was the first time in a long time where I picked up my guitar and played to each song, pretending to be part of the band. ‘Wish’ hits me the hardest on this album because you can hear an entire audience singing, “Wish there was something real, wish there was something true / Wish there was something real in this world for you.” And in this time, I cannot help but wonder how many of us are reciting these very same lyrics.

5. Joy Division – Unknown Pleasures 
Emma & Sara: The feeling, “Is that it? Is there more?” is a ghost that haunts humanity. Don’t pretend it isn’t. Even the most joyous person asks this question from time to time. Unknown Pleasures in it’s most turmoiled, poetic existence, illuminates the truths behind our being. It adds some sort of comfort despite the demise and perhaps, in this struggle, we find ourselves again. Let there be disorder, lose control, fuck your day of the lords, and fall into the interzone. This chaos is the beauty of existence and with it comes hope, a monster to have faith in. There is more. You are more. Make your fate. Unknown Pleasures is a classic because it allows you to pick your personal scabs and come out transformed. It has inspired our love for the macabre, sorrowful, and of course, post-punk.

Thanks to Emma & Sarah for sharing their Five Favourites with us!

Watch the video for Bonnie Trash’s single ‘Silence Is A Killer’ below

Follow Bonnie Trash on bandcamp, Spotify, Twitter & Instagram

Photo Credit: dana Bellamy

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Video Premiere: Feral Five – ‘Silver Sky’

Having been big fans of innovative duo Kat and Drew – aka Feral Five – ‘s unique brand of captivating electro-pop for a number of years now, we’re excited to hear that they’ve now announced the release of a new album, due out in February 2023 via lovely independent label Reckless Yes.

Ahead of the album’s release, they’ve now shared an evocative new single. Propelled by a glitchy, soaring majesty and chiming beats, ‘Silver Sky‘ poignantly reflects on the effects of light pollution in urban areas. With a glistening whirring splendour, the track builds with a fizzing energy and rich AI vocals (trained in Berlin on Kat’s voice) to a twinkling otherworldly soundscape, oozing a spellbinding allure. Of the track, the duo explain:

“‘Silver Sky’ is … set in a feral city, it’s about a sky that never gets dark because of light pollution, something that scientists say is affecting animals and plants.“

‘Silver Sky’ is accompanied by beautifully swirling visuals depicting a futuristic cityscape – all adding to the unique, immersive experience that Feral Five are consistently able to create. Skilfully interweaving live coded sounds, strings and even creating sounds from quartz crystals, ‘Silver Sky’ is yet another example of just how innovative this duo can be. Wrap your ears and eyes around its exquisite cutting edge magnificence now!

Watch the new video for ‘Silver Sky’, for the first time, here:


Truth Is The New Gold, the upcoming album from Feral Five, is set for release on 10th February 2023 via Reckless Yes.

Mari Lane
@marimindles

Photo Credit: Keira Anee Photography

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FIVE FAVOURITES: Ora Cogan

Ora Cogan is not easily categorised. Since releasing her 2007 debut, Tatter, the Canadian artist has continued to evolve in intriguing ways, not only as a musician but as an activist, filmmaker, photographer and writer. Her new EP, Dyed, follows 2020’s shapeshifting album, Bells in the Ruins, and finds her exploring gradations of shoegaze and experimental folk succoured through shadows and light. As well as the high and airy title track, described as “a cryptic rumination on awkward love,” there’s a cloudy, ephemerally anxious mood piece (‘Diver’) and a tantalising cover of PJ Harvey’s ‘To Bring You My Love’, completely reimagined within Ora’s rapt soundworld.

We think one of the best ways to get to know an artist is by asking what music inspires them. To celebrate the release of Dyed, we caught up with Ora to ask about the music that has inspired her the most. See below for their choices of her five favourite albums, and be sure to catch her on tour with Aoife Nessa Frances in November. Full list of headline and support dates here.

 

1. Buffy Sainte-Marie – Coincidence and Likely Stories
One of my favourite memories of this record is from when I was a kid. My mum and I had picked up my godmother on the side of a highway for a roadtrip. I think my godmum had just finished doing some kind of farm work, but I’m not sure. She’d click her rings on the dashboard, singing along to every song on this record at the top of her lungs as we drove through the desert. Buffy Sainte-Marie is a legend, she’s one of the greatest songwriters alive and has many mind-blowing albums of course, but Coincidence and Likely Stories was the first record of hers I heard that I fell in love with. I keep going back to these songs. Her work continues to inspire me to write honestly, to try to use songwriting as a way of finding understanding in life, in politics, in love. She inspires me to write songs that speak truth to power.

2. Fiver – Audible Songs from Rockwood
Audible Songs from Rockwood is a monumental piece of work. This record is comprised of songs Fiver (Simone Schmidt) wrote after of years of research on inmates incarcerated in the Rockwood Asylum for “the criminally insane” in Kingston, Ontario, between 1856 and 1881. The songs speak of these women’s lives and dig into matters of the heart, the justice system, colonialism, ableism. This record is more than a record, with 30 pages of liner notes featuring illustrations, history, and context for the songs. I first heard Fiver when I opened for them at one of the stops on their tour in support of this album, and they had the whole audience spellbound. I look up to them as an artist so much, and this project was such generous work.

3. Marika Papagika – The Further the Flame, The Worse It Burns Me
Marika Papagika moved to New York City from Greece and became a prolific recording artist there. She eventually opened a club with her husband in the ‘20s and had a successful music career, but that ended abruptly with the Wall Street Crash of 1929. I fell in love with Marika Papagika after Eric Isaacson at Mississippi Records introduced me to her work. Rumbetiko feels vital and familiar as I grew up listening to Jewish folk music that can sometimes have similar vocal lines. Marika’s voice felt relatable, and this record will always hold so much magic for me. Marika inspires me endlessly to be a better singer.

4. Nina Simone – Sings the Blues
The opening track, ‘Do I Move You’, kills me every time. You can hear people yelling in the recording, they were feeling it so much. I first heard this album when my friend Jeremy from Shearing Pinx was DJing a bush party a few hours north of Nanaimo. The song was echoing across a lake, and I swear I could feel the whole natural world saying, ‘Yes, Nina Simone, you move us, you move everything. The whole universe bends towards you.’ I might have been high, but it’s still the truth. She was truly the best.

5. White Magic – Through the Sun Door
White Magic (Mira Billotte) has been one of my favorite musicians forever. I first heard her when she was a part of the Washington D.C. group Quix*o*tic; their song ‘The Breeze’ stopped me dead in my tracks. My friends and I used to stay up all night crafting or painting with Through the Sun Door on repeat. For us, I think, this album was our touchstone, like a secret passageway to an alternate reality. Some music opens up entire worlds, and for me this was a teleportation device. This record is intimate but spacious. Some of it feels like tavern music, punk, psychedelic folk and experimental music at the same time. I love the unique arrangements. I don’t know any other music that breathes like this does.

Thanks to Ora Cogan for sharing her Five Favourites with us!

Watch her video for ‘Diver’ below.

Dyed, the new EP from Ora Cogan, is out now via her own label Prism Tongue Records.

Photo Credit: Journey Meyerhoff

Alan Pedder
@alanthology

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INTERVIEW: Brutus

It’s the evening before the release of Unison Life, Brutus’ third album, when I speak to drummer and vocalist Stefanie Mannaerts. She’s relaxing at home, looking forward to sharing the remaining songs that form the Belgian heavy trio’s latest record. “I have the feeling we have the best fan base ever,” she warmly enthuses. “They’re so loyal. When we put out the first single from this record ‘Dust’, the reactions were insane. We’d been away for two years, the world is fucked up – even more fucked up than before – so you think, ‘who will care about these three idiots from Belgium?’ and then we released it and it was insane. We are so fucking lucky.”

Stefanie frequently refers to Brutus as “lucky” throughout our chat, but it’s clear that the band who she playfully describes as “three idiots”’ have created their own success. From their 2017 debut Burst, to 2019’s Nest, up to the current Unison Life, Stefanie and her bandmates Stijn Vanhoegaerden (guitar) and Peter Mulders (bass) have delivered relentless, genre-blending, powerful heavy music that’s impressed the likes of Deftones, Dave Grohl, Simon Neil and many more. They have combined their collective talents to create records that absolutely command, and deserve the attention of their loyal fans.

It’s perhaps unsurprising to know that Stefanie has immense personal discipline when it comes to songwriting. When approaching the music for Unison Life, she set herself the “impossibly high standard” of writing the best songs she’s ever written, a “two-year quest of trying to do better.” This wasn’t a torturous process though. The intensity of her vision allowed Stefanie to truly focus on enjoying creating the record with her bandmates, which is reflected in the sheer force of its sound and her triumphant, self-possessed vocals.

“For me, it was the right mindset to start writing the album,” she elaborates. “As a person, I am very black or white, or I am yes or I am no, so I’m a bit extreme in my thoughts. That’s not always easy, but that’s how I am. We had so much time with this record. We had eighteen months to work on it, normally, we only have a quarter of that time to write. So having that high standard was a necessary thing for me. When I look back, I’m happy that I was so strict with myself.

It was not a short process, but it was not this draining journey. It was very reflective. We went the extra mile, and then the extra extra mile, we questioned every lyric, every riff, every note. We talked about it over and over again. I have the feeling we did everything we could to make the record how it is now. In terms of the band, I felt like we had a year and a half of quality time together as friends too, which is also why I’m very happy with it.”

This quality time was something that sustained Stefanie throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Whilst the live music scene suffered under the strain of lockdowns and other preventative measures, she felt that she was able to reframe her thinking and make the most of an unprecedented situation.

“As a band, we’re normally in such a rush all the time. We’re always rehearsing, playing the set, going on tour, doing the same thing again and again. For example, with Nest, we only had a few months to write that record. We even had to write while we were on tour, otherwise we wouldn’t finish it in time. So everything was always very rushed with this band.

I’m also a people person. So when COVID came into the world and the world stood still, I realised how much I needed friends and not colleagues. At some point when you play together so much, you kind of forget that you were friends with your bandmates in the first place. Not that we argued of course, but it just feels like you’re on this train and everyone is always trying to catch the train all the time. So for me, I look back at it as a gift, to have had all this time with my friends and my boyfriend, who is a musician too. We have been together for 11 years, but up until the pandemic we had only been on holiday together once, because our touring schedules were always so different. So, instead of mourning all the stuff that we couldn’t do because everything got cancelled, I just grabbed the opportunity with two hands to make the best out of the time while the world was fucked.”

Stefanie is aware that this wasn’t the case for many people during the early days of COVID, which is when she refers back to Brutus’ “luck” again.

“We are very lucky as a band. There are so many good bands that don’t get these chances. We have all of these people who believe in us, from fans, to labels and bookers, so when the pandemic happened I didn’t want to take anything for granted. That’s why I did this 180 in my head, instead of thinking ‘Oh fuck, we’re going to miss this tour, and this support tour,’ I was like, ‘Okay, we have to do everything we can to make this album the best that we can.”

This outlook has translated into Unison Life, a visceral, deeply engaging record exploring growth, resilience, and the inevitability of change. Stefanie’s unique vocals are underscored by her powerhouse percussion, Stijn’s rapturous guitar riffs and Peter’s brutal bass lines. With so many potent songs on the tracklist, it’s hard to pick a favourite, but for Stefanie, ‘What Have We Done’ seems to accurately capture the essence of what went into the creation of Unison Life.

“I don’t know how to explain it without sounding very ‘hippy’,” she laughs, “but when we wrote ‘What Have We Done’, it was the same feeling I had when we wrote ‘Nest’ and ‘War’. It’s a feeling where you’re super proud, but you’re also in shock that this is happening, and then scared that you’re that you’re going to fuck it up. It was something special. It felt like kind of a turning point or a crossroad for the band.”

The accompanying video for ‘What Have We Done’, made up of live footage shot by Jonas Hollevoet, shows Brutus doing what they do best, performing at their favourite festivals, Rock Herk and Lokerse Feesten. “We realised that we always take our music very seriously, but we never really took our videos very seriously,” Stefanie comments. So for Unison Life, the trio took time to work with friends who could help them achieve more ambitious visuals, particularly for singles ‘Liar’ and ‘Victoria’.

“We shot the video for ‘Liar’ in Morocco with a close friend, Maximiliaan Dierickx,” Stefanie explains. “We already had a concept that suited the story, so we talked to Maximiliaan – who is a big deal in the film industry, by the way, it’s insane that he even wanted to do it – and we chose to shoot in Morocco because the setting suited the album’s artwork and the vibe of the album. The song ‘Liar’ is about lying – obviously. I sometimes tell a lie, just so I don’t hurt anyone. I’m very uncomfortable with confrontation. I run away from it, or I overcompensate because the vibe is not nice, so the three masks in the video represent the lies that always catch me out in the end.”

“’Victoria’ is very nostalgic,” she reflects. “It’s about getting older with your friends, and even though everything sometimes sucks, it’s okay, because you’re going down together, so it doesn’t matter. I’m super proud of the videos we made with Jonas and Maximiliaan. For me, a good video has to make the music feel better, and that’s definitely what happened here.”

We move on to chatting about Stefanie’s anticipations for the band’s upcoming UK tour in November. They’re currently preparing for these shows with lots of rehearsals, so they can deliver their “best set” yet. “We have a label in England, we have friends in England, so it’s always super nice to be in the UK, it’s just a different vibe to Belgium,” she explains. Stefanie is also looking forward to something else during her stay. “You guys have the best breakfast culture ever,” she enthuses. “I’m vegan, so for me the UK is like vegan heaven. Food is very important to me!”

It goes without saying that simultaneously drumming and singing for an entire set must be an appetite-building task. When asked about this impressive feat, and whether she finds it cathartic to sing lyrics that could be interpreted as vulnerable against a backdrop of heavy music – for example, “We’ve been down this road before / I’ve never felt so insecure” on ‘Chainlife’ – Stefanie has a pragmatic response.

“I don’t know how my brain works to be honest,” she laughs. “For me, the vocals and the instruments have to be in balance. It’s not that I need a loud part of the music to say what I feel. The older I get, the more I really just have to say what I think. With our first record, the lyrics for the songs were from made up stories, and I had also only been singing for two years at that point. I think the lyrics I write now are so honest because I’ve learned that you cannot mean the music, and then not mean the lyrics when you’re singing. It took me a long time to accept that I was the singer, and to know how I am as a singer, but I see it as one instrument now.

Of course, you have to think about your technique and how you breathe, but it’s getting more normal. When we’re on tour, I cannot drink alcohol, because then I have no voice the day after, and I have to try to sleep in the bus and stuff like that. But I wouldn’t want it any other way. I work the best when I have full focus. It’s always been like this, so I just have to be thoughtful about it. I mean, I don’t get people who play guitar and sing at the same time. It’s super weird for me to see them doing that.”

Stefanie’s unique viewpoint on her capabilities as a musician is something that may have been nurtured from a young age. Her family owns a music store in Belgium, Leo Caerts, which has been trading for an impressive 45 years. Her Grandad, who bought the store, is a musician himself, her aunts and her Mother work there to this day, and she describes her Father, who helped to build the business, as “the greatest guitarist ever.” Clearly, a deep understanding of, and love for music is in Stefanie’s DNA.

“It’s a very unique thing to be in a family business like this, but I don’t know anything else,” she explains. “It’s what I’m used to. I worked in the store for eight years, I’ve studied music my entire life. It’s what I do, it’s the only thing I know.”

To wrap up our chat, I ask Stefanie what music she’s been listening to lately, to which she instantly replies with Burial. “He’s my all time favourite, always, forever and ever. I listen to him all the time,” she comments about the UK-based producer. Burial actually dropped a surprise EP titled Streetlands the following day, thus sharing a release date with Brutus’ Unison Life – a coincidence I’m sure made Stefanie very happy.

Order your copy of Brutus’ lastest album Unison Life here

BRUTUS UK Tour Dates 2022
16th Nov – Bristol, The Fleece
17th Nov – Manchester, Rebellion
18th Nov – Glasgow, Audio
19th Nov – Leeds, Lending Room
21st Nov – Brighton, Patterns
22nd Nov – London, The Garage

A full list of Brutus’ European dates for 2023 can be found here

Follow Brutus on bandcamp, Spotify, Twitter, Facebook & Instagram

Photo Credit: Kemizz

Kate Crudgington
@KCBobCut

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