DEAD BEAT

The past few weeks have been my teenage wet dream, a whirlwind running around from show to amazing show. SWANS, Morrissey, and My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult all in the same week was a wonderful homage to my angst ridden youth and seeing all these bands in New York in the beginning of a new decade in my life was nothing less than majorly significant. But the highlight were newcomersSlug Guts. Hailing from the desolate tundras of Brisbane, Australia, these post-punk no wavers are taking over where The Birthday Party left off on 1983. Dirty, sludgy and slightly maniacal, this is what I imagine playing during a shot out during a bar brawl somewhere in the desert. It's absolutely everything I could ask for and more. This is a video captured from their show live in the Wierd last week. The official video from the track SCUM off of their latest record, Keeping in Time with the Dead Beat, out on Sacred Bones Records earlier this year. Another highlight from Dead Beat includes a powerful PiL cover of Order of Death.

GIALLO FEVER

Literally translated from Italian, giallo means yellow. Referring to the genre of film and literature focusing on themes of crime, mystery, horror and eroticism. Film pioneers such as Mario Bava and Dario Argento adapted these thrillers starting in the 1960's from a series of cheap paperback mystery novels that featured yellow covers. A fan of Argento movies for many moons, my interest was renewed in this genre last week when the Anthology Film Archives featured the giallo festival, showing such gems as Deep Red, The Bird with Crystal Plumage, The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Blood and Black Lace.

I got to see a couple of these films on the big screen and Bava's Blood and Black Lace(1964) was absolutely the star of the show. Also known as six women for the murderer, it is regarded as one of the original and most influential giallo films. The plot revolves around the stalking and gruesome murders of models at a premier fashion house by a masked killer. Concerned with recovering the first victim's diary, the women are brutally murdered one by one in exaggerated and often comical ways. Below is the trailer featuring a few noteworthy scenes.