Review Summary: Great folk punk, but not as immediate as the band's previous albums.
Gogol Bordello has been in the folk punk scene - gypsy punk to be even more precise - for almost two decades and since I discovered them pretty recently I was really looking forward to this album, wondering if the US-based band had already reached its peak or was willing to give more. The band offer a varied and wide range of songs throughout its relatively small discography.
The record is immediately catchy and you can notice from the first couple of songs how good these musicians are, impressive is the fiddler's skill: sadly though this album is less folky than - for instance - "Super Taranta!" and the fiddle plays a smaller part in the accompaniment of the songs, which is quite disappointing.
Still the album gives the listener the impression that the band could give more in a live show than in a studio performance, and they do indeed: probably because the craziness of the members has its real outbreak in front of their singular audience!
Back to the record, it is varied indeed, for it has catchy folk songs such as "Dig Deep Enough", "My Gypsy Auto Pilot" or "The Other Side of the Rainbow" but it offers also slow and more emotional tracks and in this case "I Just Realized" is a good example with its nice acoustic guitar riffs.
There are also some more punk-orientated parts such as "Jealous Sister", a hidden track inside the 10-minute-long "We Shall Sail", which has inexplicably a huge gap in the very middle of the song where the silence lasts around four minutes: something a driver on the highway at night would not be really happy about.
The album is overall good and I feel like saying that none of the songs is to be considered "bad", and this makes the listening a real pleasure.
It deserves to get 4/5. I advise to give it a listen if you have the chance, and if you really get into it go see a live show of theirs because it's really worth it.
Recommended songs:
We Rise Again
Dig Deep Enough
My Gypsy Auto Pilot
Malandrino
The Other Side of the Rainbow
