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Musical Performance: Gogol BordelloThursday, August 18, 2005 (8:30 pm)They are b-a-a-a-a-ck! For hundreds of you those could stood in the long line to a sold out show, and had to go home empty-handed, you have your second chance. You might have learned your lesson though, so get your tickets early. Really. In an age of over-elaborate indie-rock concepts, sometimes the art of simply putting on a good show is overlooked. Gogol Bordello has a concept -- Gypsy-punk, to put it simply -- but its unusual timbres and rhythms wouldn't matter if the New York sextet didn't attack them with such gusto. Ukrainian-born frontman Eugene Hutz demonstrated that his stage presence is as outsize as his handlebar mustache, and the rest of the musicians (and two female dancers) ably kept pace with their unpredictable leader. Throughout the 90-minute set, Hutz bounced, brayed and romped, at one point singing with his head stuffed as far as possible into the shirt worn by accordionist Yuri Lemenshev. For some songs, he scrubbed and banged on an acoustic guitar, suggesting a toddler who's picked up the instrument for the first time. (Only during a relatively restrained encore, "Through the Roof 'N' Underground," did Hutz reveal that he can actually play the thing.) Lemenshev, violinist Sergei Riabtsev and saxophonist Ori Kaplan provided the Eastern European accent, and Oren Kaplan grounded the music with garage-rock guitar. Drummer Eliot Ferguson, the group's only American-born member, shifted fluidly from polka to reggae rhythms, while compensating for the lack of a bassist with a metronomic bass-drum kick. Gogol Bordello's music clearly owes something to the Pogues, who took a similarly anarchic approach to traditional music, and to the Pogues' New York disciples, Black 47. But that's conceptual stuff, and when the band launched such swirling extravaganzas as "Occurrence on the Border (Hopping on a Pogo-Gypsy Stick)," all that mattered were the quick-step beats and the shout-along chorus. Black Cat
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