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If the vocals make you feel queasy, maybe imagine them coming from your roommate's girlfriend. The one you're trying to steal. And if the track's lo-fi-ish production doesn't grab you, focus on the dreamy chord progression. The one ripped from Can.
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The rest of Poni Hoax's self-titled debut is a glorious trainwreck of influences, mashing up Italodisco pop, no wave funk dissonance, Ubu scrape, a near-Bauhaus sense of drama and Manchester dandyism--they may be the first band to bridge Liquid Liquid and the Smiths--but nowhere do those influences collide more violently than on "Budapest." Equal parts sex and danger, "Budapest" sounds like a great place to get laid--if you don't mind being stabbed shortly after.
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Nine times out of ten, lyrics to a track like this are incidental and exist mostly just to be repeated, but the fragments that make it out the other side of Kouklaki's anxious Eastern European stresses intact only ratchet up the creeping dread. "I may have a few contacts/ No base I could find/ The burning synagogues are lighting up all of Budapest," she finally panics, setting the table for drums and feedback squalls to crash like buildings around her. The phrase 'post-millennial tension' comes to mind.
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Built on a pulsing electronic bass line and moved along by an increasingly dramatic arrangement, "Budapest" sounds like an entire spy thriller condensed into one five minute dance floor epic, with its swelling electronic strings and crashing guitars amping up the dramatic tension, and the distinct, urgent voice of guest vocalist Olga Kouklaki providing an additional jolt of eroticism and exoticism.
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