Blue Holocaust (France) - 13 Flies on Bloodstained Velvet (2024)

 

We talk a lot about music subgenre around here. Grindcore, powerviolence, noisegrind, goregrind, fastcore, mincecore... Infinite gradations between the basic constituent parts of metal, punk and noise music. Recontextualized through time, location, means, intent, etc. to create differences that wholly change the finished work.

Film subgenres work in the same way. First, grabbing pieces from several different larger genres. Then filtering them through context (time period, country, politics, popular culture, film trends, budget, artistic intent, etc.) and ending up with a distinct group of related work. 

The Italian giallo subgenre is a prime example of this process in action. Referred to as giallo all'italiana natively and simply giallo internationally, it describes films with components of the horror and thriller genres that find their origin in a particular series of thriller and mystery novels with yellow ("giallo" meaning yellow in Italian) covers. It began coalescing as a subgenre in 1963 with director Mario Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much, a direct adaptation of one of the giallo paperbacks. Bava continued to push the subgenre forward, with 1964's fashion industry-set proto-slasher Blood and Black Lace adding layers of sex, violence and blood where other films in the subgenre focused more on mystery. Despite their historical significance, however, gialli in the 1960s were often not commercially successful. 

This changed in 1970, when a young director named Dario Argento released his first film, The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. It was a hip, stylish murder mystery about an American writer in Italy who becomes caught up in a web of killings surrounding an art gallery. The film was a hit with critics and at the international box office, and spawned a boom of sexy, stylish and violent imitators for the next several years that would signal the subgenre's most popular and prolific period. 

Argento continued to lead the boom into the mid-1970s alongside directors like Sergio Martino, Lucio Fulci, Luciano Ercoli and Bava himself. Argento's sprawling genre celebration Deep Red in 1975 became a high water mark, with the subgenre all but disappearing in the late 1970s. Argento would revisit the giallo style with Tenebre in 1982, although steeped in the cold cynicism and austere designs of the 1980s, making it a wholly different animal than the incarnations of the previous decades.

13 Flies on Bloodstained Velvet (adapting its title from another Argento film) is an exploration of both music and film subgenre. On the album, French band Blue Holocaust serve up 13 tracks of giallo-inspired goregrind. Animals were a popular subject for giallo film titles, and the band adopts that covention here, with every song title including the name of an animal. Several even borrow those titles directly, including “The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire,” “A Dragonfly for Each Corpse” and “Tail of the Scorpion" (after the Sergio Martino film known in English as The Case of the Scorpion's Tail.) While the high fashion, luxury goods and exotic locales of giallo films may at first feel like an odd fit with goregrind, the way both subgenres revel in psychological derangement, extreme violence and lurid sex make them a natural pairing.

Blue Holocaust's goregrind is fast, oppressive and grimy, with a nasty atmosphere augmented by frequent samples of English language-dubbed giallo films and trailers. The vocals are a near-constant spew of gurgles and snarls, the guitars are razor-thin buzzsaws and the drums are snappy and relentless. The production leaves little breathing room, with the instrumentation feeling like it's stacked in a coffin with its air supply running low.

Blasting freight train opener "More Venomous Than the Cobra" sets the tone for the speed and ferocity of the rest of the album, a gory blur sandwiched between two samples. "Spider Labyrinth" (named after the late 1980s supernatural giallo) is another standout: heavy, riff-filled and thrashing while maintaining a murderous pace. The jagged, circular riffing and pinch harmonics of "The Saber Toothed Tiger" set it apart from the pack as well.

The record was spawned from what was originally intended as a demo session, which speaks to its no-nonsense, workmanlike execution. As a massive giallo fan myself, I worried that the novelty of the subject matter might outpace the actual quality of the music. What I found instead was a tight, gore-soaked package that happens to be in pretty yellow wrapping paper.

If you're looking to jump into the giallo subgenre, check out my Giallo Starter Pack Letterboxd list, and to get a broader overview of notable offerings in the subgenre without having to scour the Internet, check out my Giallo Chronological list of the dozens of films in the style I've seen so far.

Buy 13 Flies on Bloodstained Velvet digitally via Blue Holocaust's Bandcamp page.