If you want to step outside your musical comfort zone, it looks like you've found what you've been seeking.
You know that feeling you get when you're trawling through your CD or vinyl collection, or shuffling through your MP3 player of choice, and you don't know what to listen to, nothing is jumping out at you and you start hankering for something a little different than the norm. This latest offering from Gogol Bordello, 'Seekers And Finders', might be just the thing you're after.
To be honest, I knew very little about this band and had to resort to the internet to get myself up to speed. Formed at the end of the nineties in New York – Manhattan to be precise (Lower East Side) – the band currently has nine members, led by their enigmatic front-man and vocalist Eugene Hutz; they are described as a Gypsy Punk band but with elements of Latin and Folk Rock thrown into the mix.
This, their seventh studio album, kicks off with a cavalry charge exchange of violin and accordion on 'Did It All', and it gallops along at a fair old lick. 'Walking On The Burning Coal' has a Rocked-up Spaghetti Western feel, a Mexican trumpet solo with the violin on the chorus giving a sense of riding the dusty plains. The title track, featuring a Regina Spektor duet with Hutz, offers us the question, "which one are you, which one am I?", in the end settling on the fact "we are all just headless riders."
The first song to be released from the album is 'Saboteur Blues' and it's the Rockiest song in the collection. It has a Punk Rock guitar intro, and as Hutz says, "... it's about the full commitment to the moment". On the live circuit is where these songs will come even more alive; they have a reputation for incendiary shows, whipping the crowds up to a frenzy, particularly with the fifties-style guitar intro to the weirdly-titled 'Familia Bonfireball' and the Bob Dylan-esque 'Still That Way'. I don't think I've heard anything like this before, but I'd say comparisons to the feel of bands like The Pogues, The Saw Doctors and even Frank Turner are near the mark.
As mentioned earlier, whether you're driving in your car, at home doing the housework or sitting around a campfire with friends and you want to step outside your musical comfort zone, it looks like you've found what you've been seeking.
Cat O'Brien