Gogol Bordello/DJ Scratchy @ Cleveland House of Blues

[Captain Hate]

When my buddy, who'd been banging on me for a longtime to go see Gogol Bordello, and I first went into the HOB, DJ Scratchy was already playing tunes. There's no need to reiterate my antipathy for warmup acts, particularly because DJ Scratchy played a very enjoyable set of by and large international music that seemed intended to be *kind of* like what was to follow. He played a little too long, primarily because I was there for one reason, but I might search his website to find some archived stuff to listen to in the future. I would imagine he's a fave of some of The Wire writers.

Probably one of the advantages of seeing them at HOB was that the setup took, at most, 10 minutes (contrast that to the Beachland Ballroom crushing people with *TWO* warmup bands and playing the songs at hearing-damaging levels: No thanks) before the lead singer (I don't know any of the names) strode to the mike and said "What the fuck's up, bitches and hos?" sounding like Boris Badenov's son going out to give Fearless Leader's daughter a good dose of some std. And they were off to the races. The crowd was very much into these guys with lots of slam dancing. Just about all the guys were cool except for one shitstain in a hoodie that I'm counting on having a short lifespan.

The lead singer was pretty good on acoustic guitar (at least I think he's good but it could be a bunch of Eastern European barroom flash; anyway he sounded good to me plus you could hear everything he played) and looked like a cross between early Springsteen and John Holmes (that's strictly on facial and above the waist resemblence; it doesn't mean it looked like he had a giant wang). All the other instrumentalists were good, particularly the guys on fiddle and accordian. Plus the girl accompanyists would appear sporadically to bang on some bass drums and sing, complete with wardrobe changes. Plus there was some diminutive singer who would come out for a song or two; I'm pretty sure he's new to the group.

All the songs sound like they could have been written sitting on the banks of the Volga swilling vodka and doing blow. The guys playing them have to be very good because it would be real easy to sound like total shit if they weren't on top of their game. At one point the singer put some banged up and dented red bucket over the mike and proceeded to play it with two drumsticks; again, this might be some barroom flash trick but despite the haphazard appearance of what he was doing, he played some complex rhythms without fucking a thing up.

I'm sure a lot of posters have seen these guys since I think they have regular NYC gigs and go up to Bard on occasion. But it was a lot of fun and I'd urge anybody looking to break out of a musical rut to check them out.