Magnolia Thunderpussy

Reviews:

Remember when an album could make you feel like you were standing in a Middle Eastern video arcade, above a Bollywood strip club, next to a new-wave taco stand, beneath a Bulgarian cowboy's speaker shop, listening to all that vinyl bleed through the walls? Okay, probably not. But Gogol Bordello frontman Eugene Hutz wants to know why multiculti cabaret doesn't create a more common experience. "Where is Arabic-dub-sextura," he asks on his band's album cover, "and where the f*** is the soundtrack for a Balkan train robbery?" Granted, these aren't exactly questions that keep most of us up at night, but with the rise of second-generation Americans raised on their mamas' native lullabies and their classmates' hip-hop singles, maybe they should be. On the Ukrainian group's third album, Hutz (who deserted Kiev for New York only after taking a detour through Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Poland) turns the tables on traditional world music DJs, driving his wheels of steel straight over all possible borderlines. Whether rapping in a cartoonishly-accented growl as klezmer horns bleat in the background or singing a phlegmy ode to transmigration over reggae beats, he and producer Tamir Muskat raise their freak flag for a subgenre they call Jewish Ukrainian Freundschaft. And if that melting-pot punk doesn't sound revolutionary to you, my only response is yet another acronym: WTF?

"Remember when an album could make you feel like you were standing in a Middle Eastern video arcade, above a Bollywood strip club, next to a new-wave taco stand, beneath a Bulgarian cowboy's speaker shop, listening to all that vinyl bleed through the walls? Okay, probably not. But Gogol Bordello frontman Eugene Hutz wants to know why multiculti cabaret doesn't create a more common experience. ""Where is Arabic-dub-sextura,"" he asks on his band's album cover, ""and where the f*** is the soundtrack for a Balkan train robbery?"" Granted, these aren't exactly questions that keep most of us up at night, but with the rise of second-generation Americans raised on their mamas' native lullabies and their classmates' hip-hop singles, maybe they should be. On the Ukrainian group's third album, Hutz (who deserted Kiev for New York only after taking a detour through Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Poland) turns the tables on traditional world music DJs, driving his wheels of steel straight over all possible borderlines. Whether rapping in a cartoonishly-accented growl as klezmer horns bleat in the background or singing a phlegmy ode to transmigration over reggae beats, he and producer Tamir Muskat raise their freak flag for a subgenre they call Jewish Ukrainian Freundschaft. And if that melting-pot punk doesn't sound revolutionary to you, my only response is yet another acronym: WTF?

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