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Gogol Bordello

Lock the doors, pull the curtains shut and hide the children in the basement - Gogol Bordello is coming! These self-styled Gypsy punk rockers are the hottest thing out of the Eastern Bloc, with a wild live stage show combining crazy costumes and ethnic Eastern European instrumentation with the fury of punk rock and a Borat-esque sense of humor. Faster than a MIG-25, louder than a Katyusha rocket and more fun than a case of Smirnoff, Gogol Bordello’s sound is wholly unlike anything else in the United States today, sounding something like a frenzied battle of the bands competition between Primus and The Clash occurring in the middle of a drunken party at a Gypsy encampment.

The story of Gogol Bordello is really the story of it’s eccentric front man, Eugene Hutz. Born in Ukraine in 1972, Eugene and his quarter-Gypsy family migrated Westward across Europe to escape the Chernobyl disaster, eventually winding up in Vermont where Eugene first blended his Eastern European musical roots with punk rock sensibilities in early bands like The Fags and Flying Fuck. This sort of music didn’t prove particularly popular in Vermont, so Eugene moved to New York City in 1997 where he soon began assembling a motley crew of Eastern Bloc troubadours.

Calling themselves Gogol Bordello (a name they arrived at by combining the last name of classic Ukranian author Nikolai Gogol with a synonym for a whorehouse), the band became a fixture at a popular dive called Pizdetz in Manhattan’s trendy Lower East Side, eventually becoming the club’s house band. Gogol Bordello released two albums (1999’s Voi-La Intruder and 2002’s Multi Kontra Culti vs. Irony) on New York-based independent label Rubric Records, eventually catching the attention of large California alternative label SideOneDummy Records (Gaslight Anthem, Flogging Molly) in 2004.