OnMilwaukee.com Review
By: Jason McDowell - onmilwaukee.com

Let me be a snob for one second while I say that I feel lucky to have seen Gogol Bordello before they became famous. The reason I'm pleased to have seen them before they were cool, however, has less to do with my hipster status and more to do with the energy of the music in relation to my proximity to the stage. It was a very personal connection. Gogol Bordello is a gypsy punk band that combines traditional Balkan sounds with the energy of modern punk music. I saw them in the summer of 2005, shortly after their EP, "East Infection" came out and well before the release of their defining album, "Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike," the album that propelled them to international stardom. Since then they've released the even stronger, non-stop, full-length album, "Super Taranta," which was ranked at No.14 in the "Rolling Stone" list of top 50 albums for 2007. They have also been featured in several movies, worked with Madonna, and played gigantic festivals all over the world. But upon my first encounter with them they were just a brightly colored punk outfit from New York and they were playing The Subterranean, a small Chicago bar and venue. The stage was pretty tiny, and the backstage was actually an upstairs, connected by a theatrical, winding staircase. The crowd that showed up was small by today's comparisons and I'm sure the 50 people that attended were considered Read More...