Dope Calypso

The Budapest based Dope Calypso is like if you would take a garage-punk band who are really into the Pixies. You could already feel this on their first album Farewell To The Fairy, Goodbye To The Ghost released in 2014. And even though that LP made onto all the relevant Hungarian lists at the end of the year, this love of genres came of age on the second LP Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!, released just 8 month after Dope Calypso’s debut.

On the 2nd album you got songs full of comics, sacred referrals and other obscure hints to the current popular culture. Telling rather absurd stories the merely more than 2 minutes long songs work also as pop songs. What these stories are like shows you vividly the band’s videos for Black Swamp Thing and Goodbye Monkey.

Banzai! Banzai! Banzai! was ranked on most of the Hungarian media list in a high position (e.g. 2nd best album on Index) and to top this achievement the song Boys From Heaven has been chosen by the jury (including Fruzsina Szép – director of Lollapalooza Berlin, Berlin Festival, Károly Gerendai – director of Sziget Festival) as being the best song of 2015 on Stenk’s song contest.

Dope Calypso’s core is given by the twitchy and delicate balance of the two guitar players, Laci Kelemen and Miki Sarkadi. While Miki’s almost only point is to have as many catchy songs as possible, Laci who works as an artist manager for two artist in Budapest (Ivan & The Parazol, makrohang) is the one to give the frames for Dope Calypso, so it can be understand as a band and not as a funny gathering of lads, writing 3 albums in 3 years. But this chemistry works so well that it was obvious right from the beginning that the band will not have a bass player. Rather than having a fourth member Laci and Miki decided to solve the sound issue within songs with a little tech trick. Seeing their set on Balcony TV you ask yourself why the hell are there bass players in that many bands anyway? But really?

The fruitfulness of Dope Calypso is proved no better than the fact that at the release of their sophomore album, the trio already had the songs for the third album. The album has the working title Mau Mau and will be recorded during the summer of 2016 in Brescia, Italy at the T.U.P. studio with the band’s newly signed drummer Áron ‘Vasaló’ Szabó, who has quite an experience being the drummer of formerly well known Hungarian bands Rémember and Nemjuci. He got state of being The Immortal Drummer by simply felling off stage during a set at Sziget festival.

The songs on Mau Mau is going to be released in November 2016.