CD: Gogol Bordello, Super Taranta!

His guest slot on Madonna's Live Earth performance of La Isla Bonita raised Eugene "Gogol Bordello" Hutz's profile by a factor of several hundred million - although 99% will have seen the moustache and wondered what Borat was doing up there. Saturday's show was probably the only time Gogol Bordello will command such a large audience, and that's obviously fine with the band, since their fourth album of rip-roaring eastern European drinking songs is as defiantly uncommercial as the other three. On American Wedding, Hutz wrings comedy out of his Ukrainian-in-New-York status ("Have you ever been to American wedding?/ Where's the vodka, where's the marinated herring?"), but elsewhere he is more reflective: My Strange Uncles from Abroad will strike a chord with any emigre who's ever been torn between the old country and the new. There's plenty of fun to be had, though the relentlessness of fiddle, accordion and Hutz's roaring vocals is exhausting.