This past Wednesday I had the enormous pleasure of seeing Gogol Bordello at the House of Blues in Boston. While I came late and missed the opening acts of Jesse Malin and The St. Marks Social and DeVotchKa, it was worth the ticket price just to catch the main act.
By the time I made it to the venue (a really great space, by the way) Gogol was already into their song second of the night, Wonderlust King, and the energy was building. The energy was high all night. People were dancing, moshing, crowd surfing and singing all night. I myself took part in all of this (never crowd surfing myself but lending a helping hand).
The band played a good mix of songs, concentrating on their latest albums, including material from their latest album, Trans-Continental Hustle. The only album they neglected was their first, Voi-La Intruder (although "Start Wearing Purple" can be considered a Voi-La song). All the songs were played wonderfully and every number was a crowd favorite. Eugene Hütz was a wild man all night, paying great attention to the audience, dancing, encouraging participation and spraying his drinks into the audience. The crowd was like a mad ocean of sweat and bodies, caught up in alcohol-fueled abandon, driven on by gypsy punk madness.
Perhaps the best part of the night was the encore. The band stepped off the stage for a breather,
and after a few minutes Hütz returned to the stage to begin an acoustic version of "Alcohol" and was joined later by violinist Sergey Ryabstev and accordionist Yuri Lemeshev. Then the rest of the band came to play their usual closer, "Baro Faro". However, the song that usually makes for a super-long jam session, took on a different nature as the band broke out into a medley, playing bits of a whole bunch of different songs they hadn't played yet, including "My Strange Uncles from Abroad" and "When the Trickster Stars A-Poking."
Unfortunately, though the show was dynamite overall, I was disappointed that dancer Pamela Racine was not there to perform. The duty of playing the marching drum was passed onto MC and percussionist Pedro Erazo. Racine's absence was still felt since it meant that there would be no marching drum crowd surfing. Still, it was a great show. Party!
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