Gogol Bordello is back in Salt Lake City this weekend, performing at the Union Event Center on Feb. 28. Opening are Boris and the Joy & Puzzled Panther. Doors are at 6 p.m.
The New York City-based “Gypsy punk” band released its 10th album earlier this month, We Mean It, Man!, on frontman Eugene Hütz’s label, Casa Gogol Records. It taps into their post-punk groove roots a little deeper than the albums that preceded it, tapping favorite producer Nick Launay — who’s produced Gang of Four, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, Killing Joke, and plenty others — to allow for that.
When I spoke with Hütz while the band was in Chicago this week, I asked him how the tour is going so far and he quipped there’s been bongo jamming in the park where a couple of people showed up, and that there’s been a real “sense of uncertainty and impending doom all around.”
“I’m joking, of course. You know how we do. We tear the roof off every single night, everywhere we go, ” Hütz says, noting Gogol Bordello can bridge the worlds between the orchestra pit and the mosh pit better than anyone else. Expect high energy. Expect dancing.
Gogol Bordello was such an ambitious project when it started in 1999. Hütz felt like they may have omitted some of its ties with the history of punk rock and post-punk, the very crucial influences that allowed them to become a band. Now that they’re on their own label, they can call the shots. They’re able to get back to those roots, and nobody stands in the way of that.
“We’re no longer waiting for somebody else’s release dates and scheduling. When we’re excited and ready to go, the time is now,” Hütz says. “Running your own camp allows you to do that.”
“Being fully present is the most important idea in life. If you’re not, you’re in fight or flight mode and just trying to get through. To have access to artistic revelation, you have to be in your own vortex and operate from your own center.”
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