`Dance!', says Gogol Bordello.

Byline: Scott McLennan

Gogol Bordello

"Super Taranta!"

(Side One Dummy Records)

* * *

In its mission to subvert, pervert and convert, the band Gogol Bordello on its new album "Super Taranta!" tears down the feel-good image of the global village and in its place erects a global refugee camp, a place where almost everyone is some sort of unwelcome immigrant.

In outlining the problem, though, Gogol Bordello also offers up a solution: dance.

With its mish-mash of Gypsy two-step rhythms, reggae splashes, flamenco flights and rock jolts plus a split brain that brings punk and folk sensibilities into the mix, Gogol Bordello is an irresistible invitation to move. At the very least, "Super Taranta!" will get your foot tapping and head bobbing, and is quite capable of sparking full-fledged spasms of pogo-ing and limb-flailing of the sort the band's own dancers engage in during a Gogol Bordello concert.

Over the past couple of years, Gogol Bordello has been sowing seeds for a grass roots following that is now firmly in place. Gogol leader Eugene Hutz, who as a teen fled Chernobyl with his family after the nuclear disaster there and ultimately landed in New York City, put together a crack troupe of players that can delve into various ethnic musical traditions and deliver them with a rock 'n' roll verve. Hutz's writing is rebellious, lusty and uninhibited as it eggs on listeners to resist any sort of conditioned conformity. But Gogol Bordello is rooted in the folk tradition of conveying the message through a story or parable or poetic turns, here carved up in Hutz's thick Eastern European accent and syntactically challenged English.

With the 2005 release of "Gypsy Punk," Gogol Bordello broke through to a broader audience, and its frenetic live shows simply stoked the fires of fandom.

With "Super Taranta!" Hutz's crew proved itself more than a passing punky gimmick. The well-established Gogol joy and nuttiness are all over "Super Taranta!," yet the record goes into deeper and darker places than "Gypsy Punk" did.

Though Gogol Bordello's sound is decidedly old-country, the band opened "Super Taranta!" with the declaration, "There was never any good old days." From there, Gogol's blend of dizzying fiddle, hard-strummed guitars, crashing percussion, boozy accordion and anchoring bass lines create a perfectly chaotic setting for Hutz to expound his views and tell his tales. And it is in the writing that punk fans will find righteously pointed lyrics of the sort The Clash crafted. Gogol Bordello takes down sleazy flesh merchants, corrupt authorities and even the American wedding (preferring traditional Eastern European three-day nuptial blowouts). The subtext at work is a notion that home and homeland are elusive and uncertain, an interesting point to make at a time when political forces crack down on immigrants.

Gogol Bordello doesn't consume itself in complaints. The group celebrates the communal bonds of "tribal connections," invokes the narcotic and liberating influences of music ("Taranta" being its variation on the Italian tarantella, which Hutz maintains cured hysterical women), and even adapts the feel and themes of a fist-pumping, freedom-endorsing power ballad with the song "Forces of Victory."

Gogol Bordello is in peak form with such songs as "Supertheory of Supereverything" and "Dub the Frequencies of Love," tunes that don't bother to acknowledge a top, much less concern themselves with being over it. And you would call it all overblown if not for the way Gogol Bordello weaves its recurring themes and motifs from one song to the next, recasting and refining its points.

But before anyone's head explodes wondering how his brother could be a proton or contemplating the prospect of an angry god casting to hell people who did not like the Stooges, Gogol Bordello is careful to rear back on the weirdness and let the music calm all the hysteria. Or better still replace it with a hysteria all its own.

Scott McLennan can be reached at [e-mail]

ART: PHOTO

CUTLINE: Gogol Bordello's Evgeny Alexandrovitch Nikolaev performs at the Paleo Festival in Nyron, Switzerland, in July.

PHOTOG: THE ASSOCIATED PTESS