Gogol Bordello @ the 9:30 Club, January 2nd

[my camera sucks, sorry]

You know, it's funny. Eugene Hutz has a terrible voice. His guitar playing is amateurish and he insists on playing an awful-sounding classical guitar. He's sorta old and pasty, yet he marauds around onstage with his shirt off, sweating, gesturing theatrically, and yelling. His live act, should not, by any rights, be this popular. And yet his band, Gogol Bordello, sold out two consecutive nights early this year at the 9:30 Club and introduced me to a new cult following that, now that I've seen it first-hand, makes total sense.

For those who don't know the group's music, their latest album is Gypsy Punks, a title that is actually pretty lame in how explicitly accurate a description of the music it is ("Come check out the new record from Death Cab For Cutie -- Precious Emo Rock!"). They play mainly at two tempos: quick, klezmer-style boom-chuck, and (somewhat inexplicably) moderately-fast reggae. Everything is in Eastern European harmonic modes (Hutz is Ukrainian) and a lot of it sounds the same and sorta blends together, but then, who am I to complain about that, given my favorite band?

I know the new record fairly well, but not to the degree where I'm shouting along with ever song. But the really remarkable thing about the Gogol Bordello live show is the type of energy he inspires from the crowd. We're talking jumping, fist-pumping, moshing, crowd-surfing -- all to an ethnologically complicated blend of gypsy fiddle, accordion, drums, bass and loud electric guitars. "Not A Crime," my favorite cut off the new record, was absolute mayhem -- limbs everywhere, girls freaking out in the crowd. Onstage, the band became a crowded nine-piece, complete with a little guy who did nothing but bang a tambourine and shout and two Asian chicks in booty shorts, one with a marching bass drum and the other with cymbals who would hit them on downbeats then hold up one hand in a sort of runway/martial pose. In fact, a lot of what went on had a decidedly martial feel to it -- mixing "punk" with Eastern European dance musicks tends to emphasize the marching beat, the heavy-handed bassiness of it, and a kind of frantic, violent energy that makes beefy frat boys, skinny Jewish hipsters, and hippy-looking girls alike go crazy.

Other highlights were particularly sing-alongy versions of “Start Wearing Purple” (a song whose meaning I really can’t decipher) and “Immigrant Punk,” both of which sound like crazed dub tracks. Needless to say, Hutz (who, incidentally looks a lot like Frank Zappa) was wylin’ out the whole time – climbing on monitors, frothing at the mouth, throwing water bottles around, etc, but nothing all that outrageous or shocking. Towards the end of the show, when he led the entire band in a run from the center of the stage, single-file out to the right wing and on top of a speaker, and the back to the left side, and that back, etc., etc. – it seemed to me almost comically tame. I sorta wanted him to grind up on one of the Asian gals or cut himself with the wine bottle that was always in his non-mic-holding hand. Something more, you know, punk. The best song performed may have been an older cut – “Supertheory of Supereverything” – which it’s utterly anthemic chorus: “I don't read the Bible / I don't trust disciple / Even if they're made of marble / Or Canal Street bling!”

My main beef with the show was that the band was constantly throwing out these false endings to their songs. The song would end on a big sustained chord, which they’d hold out, sometimes for like 3 minutes or more, with lots of layered feedback and noise, before they jumped right back into the rhythm of it, just to get the crowd going again. All of that seemed sort of unnecessary.

But on the way out, my main thought was this: It’s really amazing how merging certain types of folk music with more danceable western music seems to get the unlikeliest of people interested. I mean, it makes sense that Irish pride-yelling Bostonians get really drunk and sing along gleefully with the Dropkick Murphys, but why should M.I.A. be successful in blending hip-hop and grime with traditional Sri Lankan beats and singing styles into “Boyz” or “Bird Flu”? It’s at least a little bit counterintuitive. Likewise, I think it’s cool that all sorts of young people—be-patched punks, preppy-looking college kids, and hipsters among them, at least on Friday night—can get down with a souped-up version of klezmer, a type of music that is, on the face of things, patently uncool.