Music
Press
“Frenetic and bawdy, the eclectic BBBB have a gypsy/klezmer/Eastern European-thing going on that is very addictive and slightly unhinged. It’s funny, energetic and simply irresistible.” - Kia Ora Magazine
Danse Macabre is a five-track ep of highly energetic and entertaining music, soaked in the style of Balkan, Jewish and Gypsy flavours… all good, fun stuff. It makes you want to kick up your heels and dance like a Cossack. - Real Groove
With a sound based around accordion, clarinet, electric guitar, and lashings of laughs (they do a beautifully inebriated cover of the Dead Kennedy’s Too Drunk To F***), Polkapocalypse is theatrical, rebellious and fun party music.
- NZ Herald
The Benka Boradovsky Bordello Band is the most un-kiwi sounding kiwi band imaginable. While the title Danse Macabre comes from the French translation of The Dance Of Death, the EP sounds more like it hails from around the campfire of an Eastern European gypsy camp. Although four of the five tracks are traditional compositions it is still no mean feat that they have all the essence of another time and place. The band justifies this cultural discrepancy by calling their hometown Auckland “the Prague of the South”. Emanating seemingly unlimited passion and desire, the group’s charm is also rooted in their playfulness. This spills right down into the fact that after the instruments are credited, their band roles are allocated from licentious flirtations to coy glances and devilish grins. Best served with a generous helping of alcohol, preferably vodka, to get in the generously lubricated spirit of the recording. - Groove Guide
Discography
Dance Macabre ep
Polkapocalypse album
Photos
Bio
Hailing from the slums and ghettos of Auckland, New Zealand (the Prague of the South), The Benka Boradovsky Bordello Band bring their unique brand of highly theatrically East-European Apocalyptic Debauchery to those in need, wherever they may be. Expect spontaneous combustion in the audience, clothes thrown off in frivolous rampage, macabre stories, legs turning into snakes, much musical and physical inebriation, and dancing, dancing, dancing... When Balkan, Punk, Cabaret and Swing combine, nuclear meltdowns of worlds begin.
The band is currently lurking in Berlin, and will be destroying minds and lifting knees and skirts across Europe for the next six months, until late November. Upon their return, they plan to bring a whole new Bacchanalia to New Zealand in another of their famed summer tours, as well as festivals across the country.
After first emerging from an alleyway behind Auckland's Wine Cellar sometime in May of 2006, the band has gone from enigma to sensation. In April 2008, the band released their first ep, Danse Macabre which lingered in the Independent NZ top 40 for several months and the riotous energetic video for the single, The Dance of Death, has been in the top five most watched videos on Amplifier for over a year. In this time the band has completed three highly successful nationwide tours, brought the bordello to some of the country's biggest summer festivals (including Prana, Jambalaya, Parihaka, Cross St Carnival, Fleetwaters and Splore), performed at AK09, Auckland's biggest bi-annual arts festival, played in 'The Famous Spiegeltent', and opened for American band Beirut. Now, with the release of their album, Polkapocalypse, on Monkey Records the band has relocated to Europe, and is ready to delve deeper, further past the apocalypse, into unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch fantasy.
The new album fully captures the passion, mystery and intoxication of a Benka performance, from frenzied dances to despairing ballads and macabre stories. It contains 4 originals, 4 traditional songs and two covers: 'The Crack of Doom' by the Tiger Lilies and 'Too Drunk To F**k' by The Dead Kennedys. Seven of the songs were recorded at Black Bridge Studios by Jamie Newman during a hot, steamy weekend in March and the live experience is captured on three tracks recorded by Andre Upston for Radio New Zealand at the Monkey Magic launch at Galatos in May last year. The first single from the album is 'The Crack of Doom' to be followed by 'Polkapocalytptic'.
Links
