Review by Jason Norwood
Rating: ***
Standout track: Immigraniada (We Comin' Rougher)
To skim this album, you'd think it was a bit of a joke. Look a bit deeper, though, and you see the same out-of-place elements of punk that made the Dropkick Murphys and the Pogues famous. Whip a little essence-of-dub into the mix and you have Gogol Bordello, a band that takes all of those things and throws it in a blender. Not all of it is stellar material, and sometimes Eugene Hütz's voice is a little hard to take. Then again, so was Shane MacGowan's. What the album lacks in precision, it makes up for in energy and sheer fun. Go to a party, wait until everyone is halfway to being drunk, and throw it on--I'm pretty sure you'll have a good amount of people dancing to it. It may be that the music goes better with the theatrics that the band is famed for, but without the visual, the album is a whole lot of fun, but not one that will be stuck in my CD player.