Gogol Bordello

I was in a Hot Topic of all places, where I picked up the new Gogol Bordello album Super Taranta and popped it into the car stereo for the drive back to Canada. This is the band’s fifth CD, and a strong follow up to their previous Gypsy Punks CD from 2005.

Accompanying the new album, Gogol Bordello staged with an across-the-globe tour which brought them from their home in the U.S. all the way to Moscow and even further to places like Japan. I had the pleasure of seeing their first of two sold out shows at the Commodore in Vancouver B.C, where hundreds of punks sporting their mowhawks, gypsies with their coloured bedlahs shimmying to the music, and a huge range of ethnicities, ages and attitudes all had one thing in common. Gogol Bordello.

Frontman Eugene took the stage wielding a bottle of red wine, with his moustache curled around his mouth. The band looked purely European, as though they would be playing a halftime show at a soccer game. GB was ready to rock in their Adidas running shoes and track pants, and after the first song they had given us so much energy that they were dripping sweat already.

From the new album they gave us hits like Wonderlust King (which I just ntocied has also been featured in a PS3 commercial for Motorstorm, and had all of us at the front of the stage bouncing around signing “dadadadada, dadadadada, dadadadada, hey!” Later, one member of the audience proposed to his girlfriend on stage, making a great lead into American Wedding which was sang as “Canadian Wedding.” If this song doesn’t make you dance and sing it will certainly make you laugh as it pokes fun at how boring and dry our wedding ceremonies are in comparison to the giant weeklong festivals of celebration in other cultures.

From the Gypsy Punk CD Gogol Bordello gave us my personal favourite, Mishto! which is a song that spirals up and down slowly building up force and then kicking you in the pants, like someone just corked a bottle of champagne in your face at 3am at an after party, and you're dancing with some Russian guy who looks like he was the strong man at the circus in 1930.



I knew as soon as I heard the opening notes for Start Wearing Purple that the venue was going to explode, and I was right, some girl behind me that smelled like McDonalds was jumping for joy, or perhaps I should say humping for joy cuz that’s what it felt like from my being in front of her. Lucky for me, I used my bootylischiousness to my advantage and she was quick to jump somewhere else. Sergey, the violinist was constantly playing with so much force that he was breaking strings on his violin and grabbing another violin as he didn’t have time to fix the strings. At one point he went through three bows in a single song.

When they performed I Would Never Wanna Be Young Again Eugene pretended to strangle the two girls, Pamela and Elizabeth while they shrieked blood curdling screams to the song. The girls also donned a giant marching band drum while the band played on, which was mildly amusing since the drum was bigger than the girl who was wearing it, but it only added to the spectacle. GB also preformed hits like Think Locally Fuck Globally and for the encore they gave us Alcohol with the chorus of “I’ll go home” sounding like an end of the night slightly slurred melody where Eugene opened the bottle of red he had brought out at the beginning of the night and took a swig.

If you haven’t seen Gogol Bordello live, I highly recommend checking them out and picking up their new CD Super Taranta, if not for the songs they sang live for the other tracks on the CD which include the mesmerizing violins of Super Taranta and the drunken sing-along of Tribal Connection which will get everyone singing “No can’t do this, no can’t do that…” and toasting their glasses of red to the sky. Gogol Bordello is an energetic and powerful band that gives every performance on stage like it is their last.