GOGOL BORDELLO Super Taranta (2007)

30 June 2007
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It is summertime. Open up the window, invite the sun in, pour a beer and try to look beyond the concrete edges to some meadow, forest or a mountain. You may see some multicoloured gypsy tents. Now play Gogol Bordello. You see, that the picturesque zingarism is everywhere. The band is founded by Eugene Hűtz (real name - Evgenii Nikolaev) - a Ukrainian emigrant in the USA whose family moved to Uncle Sam after the explosion in Chernobyl. Eugene himself claims that his grandmother is a gypsy. In New York he feels not at home and he dashes into a pursuit of his roots on the louder and energetic way. With true adherents, most of which are also emigrants, he forms the colourful gypsy camp Gogol Bordello and plunges into eccentric performance and songwriting which, common to the gypsy nomadic life, combines pieces of all the cultures it collides with. Typical gypsy melodies are stirred with Russian immigrant songs, Hungarian folklore, polka and punk in an insane hotchpotch of humour and motley emotions. “Super Taranta” is the new album by the pack and it has nothing different compared to the previous ones. The songs bear a lot of mood, edgy accent, cynicism, love, joyful drinking melodies served with lots of shouts, clattering, acoustic guitars, accordion, violins and vivid rhythm. There are songs honoring women, like “Zina-Marina” (a list of all the girls that the moustache-bearing savage can remember of) and “Harem in Tuscani (Taranta)”, telling of the misadventures of the ever ready for a flirt hero; songs of drunkenness (“Alcohol”, “Suddenly... I Miss Carpaty”); melodies of the ever roaming rolling stone (“My Strange Uncles from Abroad”, “Your Country”), and frankly frenetic hymns of life and freedom like “American Wedding” and “Super Taranta”. Russian and English texts alternate in the songs, along the accordion, acoustic guitars, percussions and violins, just like the variety of silk socks, duck drawers, beads and gold over the stately body of an old zingara. The album raises the nomadic sense sleeping in the chest of everyone like a dungfly over the croup of scraggy mare dragging a shabby gipsy caravan. One CD and over an hour of gaily, multilingual and multi-styled music and not-engaging cheer spirit. In one word – zingarism.
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