Gogol Bordello “Gypsy Punks”
I feel somewhat bad in ways, reviewing this album after having it, listening to it and falling in love with it for so long before writing about it. I guess I mostly feel like it’s unfair to other bands whose albums I hear maybe a handful of times and then write reviews about them. But I’ve listened to this album in multiple states, which is hard for me to say because I rarely try to leave Texas.
Gogol Bordello crafts their own style of music that can simply be described as gypsy punk, obviously. It’s like how Flogging Molly took a particular style of music and sped it up in a punk rock way (At least on their album “Swagger”)
But there isn’t really anything about Gogol Bordello that I can compare to other bands for you to get a reference point. It’s madness. It’s chaos. It’s fast moving (Though not without a slow song or two) It’s what you would expect a sort of traveling band of gypsies to sound like (Of which I have no reference point either) if they were somehow transformed into punk rockers. It’s multi=instruments, many out of the normal punk rock realm, and the guitars sound acoustic more often than not. Sometimes the guitar riff can even sound like ska, but there is barely any ska in these songs.
In addition to the defiant style of music this band presents, they also happen to have lyrics that mean something. Sure, they have love songs as well, but many of their songs are radical anthems about oppression, struggles, hardships, you know, all of the things that punk used to be about before it became a fashion statement you could purchase at your local mall.
Another interesting aspect of their music is simply that they can also be described as “immigrant punk”, which is something that they like to sing about—being immigrants and how immigrants seem to be treated in general, though they never really seem to do so in an overly whiny or bitchy sort of way.
On the twelfth song you get the most essential line “You are the only light there is for yourself, my friend” on a bit of a slower song and of course song 9 is the all important “Start Wearing Purple”. This is definitely an album that you should own on vinyl.
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