Since Buio Omega’s name comes from a ’70s Italian horror flick about a taxidermist experiencing bouts of insanity after his girlfriend’s death, you’d think the members of this Twin Cities five-piece would have some intense personal connection with that movie. Not so, chuckles guitarist Nikki Derella. Only their singer, Greer, has seen it.
“She keeps on trying to get all of us together to watch it,” Derella explains, “but our drummer doesn’t really like movies.”
In addition to Greer and Derella, Buio Omega (the band) includes Matt Jones (guitar), Midge (bass), and Josh Olson (drums). Jones and Olson previously played together in Close Talker; Jones’s partner was roommates with Midge (previously of Liquid Lunch and other local bands); and Greer they simply spotted at a house show wearing “an incredible outfit” in 2022, when Jones approached to ask if she wanted to be in a band. Derella had just moved here from Florida, but knew Jones from a fest they’d played together in Iowa back in the 2010s and met Greer at Punk Baseball in Powderhorn.
While their tastes in Italian horror might not totally overlap, Derella and their bandmates have all kinds of other common interests. Greer and Derella bonded early on over a shared love of pro wrestling, and Greer wrote “Insult to Injury,” which appears on Buio Omega’s debut EP Take a Look, about Aja Kong and Bull Nakano’s 1990 chain-link cagematch in Japan. (“We actually had a link to the YouTube video in the info on our BandCamp,” Derella laughs.)
Pro wrestling—particularly women’s pro wrestling, and particularly that iconically violent cagematch—might help you get a handle on Buio Omega’s whole thing. There’s the swagger, the performance of gender, the brashness, the camp.
On “Take a Look,” Greer shrieks “TUCK YOUR TAIL AND HIDE/YOU’RE A COWARD AND IT SHOWS/FIGHT OR FLIGHT BITCH/I KNOW WHICH WAY YOU’LL GO.” (Can’t you just hear her cutting a promo before Monday Night RAW?) “Bad Taste” squeals with chain-and-spikes horniness, while “I Wanna Crash My Car (on Purpose)” is a crowd favorite about… well, that’s fairly self-explanatory, isn’t it? Sex, sleaze, self-destruction—throw it all in a blender with ’80s glam makeup and a chainsaw, and you’ve got a Buio Omega EP. In here, it’s all id, baby.
Well, maybe not all. “Diva Moment,” the title track that leads off Buio Omega’s most recent five-song EP, has a “funny-sad origin” that begins when Derella’s roommate and Greer’s close friend Luis took his own life. A few weeks later, they were at First Avenue for Wrestlepalooza, where F1rst Wrestling’s Arik Cannon talked about Luis onstage; hearing that, Greer started bawling. She was crying so hard that when she checked her phone, she saw a DM from a stranger whose boyfriend had seen her and worried whether she was OK.
Greer replied, as she howls throughout the blistering one-minute, 33-second track, “It’s just a diva moment.”
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