The first time I heard Gogol Bordello and songs like ‘Immigrant Punk’, ‘Not a Crime’, ‘Think Locally, Fuck Globally’, and of course their signature anthem ‘Start Wearing Purple’, I thought I had discovered the ultimate exuberant band with no limits and no boundaries. It actually was, and still is, what frontman Eugene Hütz was preaching all over the songs: there are no borders, no frontiers, and my forever-traveling gypsy troupe will never settle in! The music was foreign in the east-European sense of the term, the lyrics were bold in the most in-your-face sense of the term, and live, it was the most thrilling-exhilarating experience, a punk energy explosion led by a restless frontman wearing the most famous mustache in the world and barreling on stage with an energy rarely matched by another guy. I have seen Hütz and his band a few times, and although this guy may not be the most handsome man in the world, he is a total chick magnet, they are all crazy about him! On stage he is an unmasked Zorro or Spiderman, carried by the crowd at the top of a drum, riding the storm, bearing his natural charisma at arm length and totally enjoying it.
So here is the band’s sixth studio album, ‘Pura Vida Conspiracy’, with 12 new songs (plus a hidden track), and if Eugene Hütz is still the circus ring leader of his traveling gypsy punk band, the euphoric effect of their first albums has slow down quite a bit. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy this last one, but there is nothing as catchy or epic as ‘Wonderlust King’ or as bold as the lyrics of ‘Supertheory of Supereverything’ (‘I don’t read the Bible/I don’t trust disciple’) or ‘Illumination’ (‘You are the only light there is/For yourself my friend /There’ll be no saviors any soon coming down’) or ‘Ultimate’ (‘There was never any good old days/They are today, they are tomorrow/It’s a stupid thing we say/Cursing tomorrow with sorrow’).
In interviews, Eugene Hütz made the meaning of the album clear, as he said it ‘points to the idea that generally people are constantly obsessed and concerned with things that are going wrong’, and ‘points to the positive force of human potential and what we as humans can do creatively, politically and spiritually’. However, ‘Pura Vida Conspiracy’ reveals less action-driven but more nostalgic-reflection songs then usual, with a few exceptions like the pirate raise-your-glass track ‘Name your Ship’ (‘It’s the way you name your ship/That’s the way it’s gonna row’) or the opening punk anthem ‘We Rise Again’ (‘I guess anything you wanna do you gotta do it on your own’… ‘Borders are scars on face of the planet’). The same way, the music is tamed down, there are still explosive choruses, but the musical multi-influences, due to all this traveling all over the planet and the seven seas, may have diluted a bit the original raw punk energy of the past.
As much as I like the song ‘Malandrino’, its bravado and guitar-accordion catchy chorus, this is something my mother could love, and she is 74… there is nothing wrong with that, but I mean by that you shouldn’t look for any furious punk rage in this album, it’s more about sing along verses with gypsy violin and mariachi trumpet, or about any music influence that they may have grabbed along the way; there are a lot of influences from Latin America (Hütz have lived in Brazil for the last past 5 years) but the influences are coming more from the rambunctious spirit of the continent than from any specific genre.
Still I can picture all these songs becoming alive on stage, as they are all very visually colorful and totally ‘ensemble songs’, with the different team member of Gogol Bordello running in every direction like a meteor shower, as it is always the case. I am sure they can produce the same craziness live, although ‘Pura Vida Conspiracy’ doesn’t sound as crazy-original as the music that they have produced in the past, the music that got me hooked, mostly represented by ‘East Infection’, and ‘Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike’… At the end, except if this album mysteriously grows on me, I don’t see myself listening to ‘Pura Vida Conspiracy’ in repeat as I have done it for their earlier music, but can we hold against a band to produce a sound constantly evolving and changing? Certainly not. Eugene Hütz’s Russian accent and larger-than-life personality are still bursting at each track, and the party-feeling is also still there with a few campfire-gypsy-violin-and-guitar-driven songs such as the relatively calm ‘Amen’, and especially the stripped down acoustic guitar of the last track ‘We Shall Sail’. In any case, just be sure to listen till the end, the hidden track (‘Jealous Sister’?) may burst at your face like a furious punk middle-eastern dynamite they have kept for the end.