Start Wearing Purple

Eugene Hütz arrives like a man who has decided that the boundary between punk rock and Romani music was always imaginary, and he intends to prove it at volume. The accordion enters first, giving the song its lurching carnival momentum before the electric guitars hit with a crunch that belongs equally to the CBGBs tradition and to the courtyards of eastern European wedding bands. The tempo is locked in a stomping gallop that makes standing still physiologically uncomfortable — the snare hits like a demand rather than a suggestion. Hütz's voice is part rasp, part bark, part romantic declaration; he sings in the mode of someone who has thought carefully about freedom and arrived at the conclusion that it requires costume, spectacle, and significant volume. The lyrical premise is absurd on its surface — a request, or perhaps a command, that a lover abandon sensible clothing for something more flamboyant — but underneath runs a genuine manifesto about refusing the gray economies of conformity. Gogol Bordello built their reputation in the Lower East Side underground of the early 2000s, playing to immigrant communities and punk kids with equal ferocity, and this song distills everything that made that scene vital. It belongs at a party where the music is too loud for conversation, which is the point — at some moment the body should take over from the brain entirely.