Bonnie Trash @ The Grace, London (Live Review) ^Featured

Bonnie Trash

The Grace

Word & Pics by Captain Stavros

Caught Red Right Handed: Bonnie Trash Possess The Grace  

This evening has been years in the making, but most of London is unwittingly missing out. Just outside Highbury & Islington Tube, The Grace looms like a scar on the city’s skin; a part of London forever caught between polish and grime. Tonight promises to get filthier still. It’s Monday night, and it’s time to take out the Trash. Only this time, the Trash is taking us out, white-hot and merciless.  The Bortolon-Vettor twins take the stage like revenants. Sarafina, leather-clad and statuesque, fixes the room with a Medusan stare and doesn’t let go until the final feedback collapses into the floor. A perfect crucible for Bonnie Trash’s brand of gothic demolition. They launch straight into ‘Maria’, a convulsion of riffs and vocal shrieks that feels like it’s been waiting years to escape. Emmalia, half-hidden beneath her fringe and oversized leathers, hammers out riffs so loud the sound techs beg her to turn down. She obliges only with the reluctance of someone sacrificing a child. This doesn’t stop them from twisting the fretboard into something ugly and unholy, stubbornly loud enough that the sound techs continue to plead for mercy. She relents with all the grace of a predator letting go of prey.

But it’s Emma on bass who draws the eyes almost as much as the ears. Bespectacled, wide-eyed like some nocturnal owl, sci-fi tattoos crawling up her arms, she drops basslines that feel like seismic aftershocks under the floorboards. Together with Dana on drums; a shadowy powerhouse who bends cymbals and time signatures seemingly with the ease of a mentalist warping spoons. Instead of tearing the place apart she was the cohesive and rhythmic gravitational force magnetising Bonnie Trash to the stage. Together they formed a storm system, black-skied and unpredictable. They stitched terror into melody as deftly as a surgeon’s hand.

The setlist reads like a series of open wounds: ‘Veil’, ‘Hell’, ‘Poison’, ‘Zero’. Each track claws deeper into the night and into the backs of our skulls. Their mid-set lunge into ‘Red Right Hand’ doesn’t honour Nick Cave so much as obliterates him. This isn’t Cave’s sly preacher. This is a mauling; a ruthless, feral reimagining that strips the flesh from the original. Arguably the hardest, most merciless version of it ever wrung from the source, brutal and snarling. The vocals continue to scrape against the tremolo guitars, a jagged clash that leaves no space for thought tonight. Forget spectacle, this is attrition by decibel; a show that feels wired to outlast you.

By the end, after ‘What Have You Become’ seals the night shut, guitars slump against amps like wreckage and the stage feels like it’s been levelled. Sarafina peels off her coat to deliver a raw “please don’t leave me rotting in the ground,” and for a moment the crowd seems ready to hand over their souls in exchange. Religion doesn’t quite cover it; this was something colder, more physical, like being possessed by a frequency too low for the human ear. And yet, when the noise subsides, the frost thaws. Bonnie Trash become mortal again, thanking every last punter, signing anything shoved in their hands, and laughing about careering rentals down unlit country roads on the “wrong” side of the lanes. But for the hour before that? They weren’t a band. They were an entity dragging us into their orbit, and leaving us changed.