Guelph band Bonnie Trash channels goth inspiration from Italian roots

Halloween be damned. Bonnie Trash has been out to scare you from the beginning.

To be fair, Sarafina and Emmalia Bortolon-Vettor — the deceptively sweet twin sisters at the (dark) heart of this thrillingly evil Guelph noise-rock combo — come by their shared penchant for a good creep-out honestly. Their beloved grandmother, fondly known as Nonna Maria to the girls, spent a good chunk of her 93 years on this earth filling their heads with real-life horror stories drawn from genuine supernatural experiences and ancestral folklore passed down from their family’s Italian homeland.

Indeed, Bonnie Trash’s head-turning, hackle-raising 2017 debut cassette, “Ezzelini’s Dead,” featured Nonna Maria herself sharing recorded tales in the vanishing Veneto dialect of the many crimes against humanity perpetrated by medieval tyrant (and suspected cannibal) Ezzelino III da Romano in the region from whence the Bortolon-Vettor family originally hailed. And Nonna Maria is back as a sort of third member of Bonnie Trash on the band’s long-in-the-making proper first album, “Malocchio” — released Oct. 28 on Toronto indie label Hand Drawn Dracula just in time for All Hallow’s Eve – opening and closing the record with more spooky stories of hauntings, ominous omens and the “evil eye” curse (or “malocchio”) that may or may not have afflicted their relatives in the past.

“So, yeah, these were true stories that we heard as kids. Isn’t that just fun?” laughed Sara, the voice and drumbeat of Bonnie Trash, during a video call with her sister earlier this week.

“She would 100-per cent do it just to freak us out,” said Emma, the band’s formidable guitarist. “Like, letting us know about certain places where people would be having exorcisms in northern Italy where they’re from and her sister reportedly having received the ‘evil eye’ and having some sort of possession put on her and how they had to take steps to rid her of the evil eye.”

Needless to say, while Nonna Maria sadly passed away on May 6 of this year, she’s cast a long shadow over Bonnie Trash, who’ve spun their inherited passion for the mysteries of the occult, horror films and malevolent sounds in general — Joy Division, Godspeed! You Black Emperor, Black Sabbath and the darker reaches of the P.J. Harvey catalogue definitely rank as influences — into one of this year’s most captivating releases on “Malocchio.”

The sisters, these days joined onstage by drummer Dana Bellamy and bassist Alanna Gurr, fete the album’s arrival this Friday in Toronto with a gig alongside fellow Goth-rockers Ace of Wands and dream-popsters Twin Rains for the Wavelength crew at 805 Dovercourt Rd. and another sold-out hometown show in Guelph at 10C on Saturday.

Bonnie Trash is a ferocious live act, and that comes through on “Malocchio” thanks, in no small part to some bruising production work by Josh Korody of Beliefs and Breeze. But the Bortolon-Vettor sisters also suspect they might simply be channelling the temper of these troubled, violent post-pandemic times.

“It’s definitely a ‘brood.’ I think there’s a deep rumination going on,” said Sara. “I think it’s the second or third deep rumination. You know, two years ago it seemed novel when everybody said ‘I’m gonna work on myself’ and everybody said ‘Great, cool.’ And then 2021 was ‘Oh, can we do this again? No.’ But then this brood keeps happening and even more awful things start happening around the world and you can’t separate yourself because we’re all inevitably connected, right?”

“It’s like everybody’s already unleashed their own ‘malocchio’ onto things,” said Emma. “It’s like they already gave (themselves) a hex and everything is hexed. So in what ways can we move away from this?”

“And also make positive change,” added Sara. “That’s the really important thing. As much as this record is very haunting and we’re here to tell you about these real-life horror stories … horror is a form of storytelling that subverts the norm to show you how f—-up the ‘norm’ is. That’s the whole purpose of it.”