Eugene Hutz would very much like you to know he's Ukrainian. Or Serb, Russian, Gypsy, whatever: he's from over there and rocks the 'stache to prove it. A self-exoticizing project that brought oompah-punk to downtown NYC, his Gogol Bordello exude the precise kind of gleeful inauthenticity that gets the hipsters horny. The overarching mood is that of a wasted shotgun wedding in the Karpaty, but guests on both sides of the puke-flecked altar wear vintage corduroys and wouldn't know their rakiya from their gorilka.
Mind you, this is not a bad thing: Nikolai Gogol himself used his Ukrainian heritage primarily for flavor, and did his best writing in Rome. Bordello compensate for their calculated image with true immigrant work ethic-- for years, they'd tear up any club that would risk booking them, and Hutz's weekly DJ stint is still, improbably, on.
The band's debut CD, Voi-La Intruder, couldn't possibly recreate their onstage freneticism and hunger; for that, it would had to have come packaged with a Stoli and a blunt, but it toiled hard for its money all the same. Production was near-absent: fiddles and accordions waged a shoving match for the studio's seemingly lone microphone; on top of the racket, Hutz made like a winterized Nick Cave, gutturally imploring the listener to "start wearing purple for me now".
The sophomore Multi Kontra Culti Vs. Irony is a much more realized record: Bordello's blend of punk, folk, cabaret and what the Russians call "cruel romance" music is now smoother and more organic. Alas, as the band blew up in the intervening years, so did its ultimate ambition to become the world's next Manu Chao. A mere party record wouldn't cut it, and judging from the successes of Clandestino and Antibalas, we like our funk cut up with agitprop. Hutz and Co. are only too happy to oblige, and Multi Kontra Culti finds the crew deploying their ESL vocabulary in the service of vague political tirades.
Where Voi-La spun drunken tales of green card marriages, the new record feigns rage against fashionable bogeymen of globalization and, well, irony. To make matters worse, Gogol Bordello feel the need to constantly mention their masterplan for fear we won't connect the dots: a mildly raucous number is called "Punk Rock Parranda" as insurance. A song that's equal parts punk and gypsy waltz earns the name "Hopping on a Pogo Gypsy Stick", which is less a title than a ready-made blurb. That's mighty media-conscious, coming from people whose website places the press links over a graphic of an unspooling toilet paper roll.
Buy it if you must, but the only sensible thing to do with grand anti-irony proclamations is, of course, to read them as irony. Gogol Bordello lack anything resembling an actual platform: when Hutz sings "Let's get radical / Not ironic," he doesn't propose a specific brand of radicalism, he just floats a buzzword that happens to occupy his orbit, like "green card", "contraband", "punk", "passport" and "gypsy". Typifying ambitious immigrants, Gogol Bordello have quickly learned how to sell old wares in their new environment.
