Gogol Bordello @ Boulder Theater, March 7
Words: Jonathan Kosakow
Images: Michael Stein [from March 8 performance at Denver’s Ogden Theatre]
Have you ever sat in a room watching a group of people on stage, knowing that a revolution could start right then and there? Like all the universes would collide and each and every human being in attendance would ban together and start ripping the chairs from their bolts, simply to rejoice in their unity? Well, neither have I, but a Gogol Bordello performance may be the closest I’ve come. As I stood on the balcony, looking out over a sold-out crowd in the 1,000 seat standing room only Boulder Theater last week, I thought for a brief moment that some sort of sweet, kind, backwards riot might break out and everyone would grab the closest person to them and just start fucking, because there is hardly any other better way to join together in body mind and soul with another human being than that.
[All Photos by Michael Stein]
For Gogol Bordello, it would seem that unity is what they’re after. Even if you lost your hearing at a Bordello show (which is not entirely impossible, as loud as they play, and as loud as the crowd gets), you could tell just by looking at the melting pot of performers on stage that they are in favor of diversity. Meanwhile the crowd, like the population of Boulder, Colorado was quite the opposite: at its core, a bunch of white people (though admittedly they were altogether quite different seeming from one spot to the next).
But with your ears, it’s clear how Gogol Bordello’s “gypsy punk” is, at its essence, unifying. By blending so many styles into one that is entirely their own, they have created something as uniquely diverse as New Orleans’ gumbo. A restless recess into musically satisfying punk, played with acoustic guitar, violin, conga drums, a hype-man emcee and a Brazilian accented lead singer. Like a meeting of the G20 Summit that erupts into a Persian wedding.
Opener Mexican Institute of Sound deserves quite the shout-out as well – though not only for the DJ set put on by Camilo Lara on Wednesday, but for the fact that the full band is arguably just as energizing as Gogol. Had the full band played to open this show, the smell of sweat as it dripped from every dancing audience member would have rendered the Boulder Theater unusable until it could be properly cleaned and aired out. Instead, the DJ set of M.I.S. was a slow build up of Mexican hip hop inspired beats that were perfectly appropriate as the walk-on music for Gogol, before they tore the place limb from limb themselves.
