Gogol Bordello

Charging at you like a steam-powered tinker's cart, Super Taranta! is the fifth effort from the genre-bending Gogol Bordello, who simultaneously revive and invent musical styles while creating the soundtrack to one heck of an Eastern bloc party. Eugene Hutz has all the mojo of a carnival barker as he captains his raucous crew through its Minor Threat-meets-Bulgarian wedding corpus. Perhaps no song explains the band's anything-goes attitude better than "Tribal Connection," which hints at the common ancestry of its dub/klezmer/skiffle rock-out.

"There were never any good old days/They are today, they are tomorrow/It's a stupid
thing we say/Cursing tomorrow with sorrow." So swears "Ultimate," the smartest song Gogol
Bordello have ever recorded and the smartest song anyone will release this year. It rocks
in its own language - a defiantly oversimplified gypsy stomp played loud and then
double-timed by a Russian violinist, a Russian accordionist, an Israeli guitarist, an... More >

"There were never any good old days/They are today, they are tomorrow/It's a stupid thing we say/Cursing tomorrow with sorrow." So swears "Ultimate," the smartest song Gogol Bordello has ever recorded and the smartest song anyone will release this year. The beat won't be to everyone's taste: a defiantly oversimplified Gypsy stomp played loud and then double-timed by a Russian violinist, a Russian accordionist, an Israeli guitarist, an Ethiopian bassist, and an American drummer. But it rocks. And its optimism of the will makes the futures imagined by competing alt prophets seem weak-minded. This is an explosive album by a band on a mission. Nominally based in Brooklyn, Chernobyl survivor Hutz and his cohort fuse Gypsy statelessness and rock-bohemian "Wanderlust"--the title of a song about "challenging definitions of sin"--for a restive world citizenry uprooted by war and capital. If you're not an immigrant, they hint, you're lucky, but you also don't know what it is to be alive. Which makes you doubly lucky that Gogol Bordello has figured out how to tell you. (Grade - ****)