Gogol Bordello (a.k.a. the best live band on Earth, depending on who you ask) rocks harder on its first album in four years than it has in a decade, which doesn’t mean 2013’s Pura Vida Conspiracy wasn’t slightly better. But it wasn’t flirting with martial psychobilly as Eugene Hütz and his band do here, on galloping opener “Did It All” or slippery, machine-gunned shuffle “Break Into Your Higher Self.” Seekers And Finders is the straight cannonball the world’s premier Gypsy punks haven’t quite offered since 2005’s Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike itself, the unendingly breakneck, near-perfect encapsulation of a vision and genre they came up with all by themselves. Excellent first single “Saboteur Blues” is among their best, with Sergey Ryabtsev’s trapeze-swinging violin riff evoking all sorts of high-flying chutes and ladders. But Gogol’s ability to surprise is almost as underrated as its idiosyncratic mastery of its own sound, enlisting Regina Spektor for probably the most intense tune she’s ever lent her name to, “Seekers And Finders.” We know which one they are.
—Dan Weiss
