Gogol Bordello

The last time Gogol Bordello performed at the Granada, the band filled a clothes dryer with a tour’s worth of dirty laundry and turned it on, blasting the funky exhaust into the audience.

The gesture was completely unnecessary: Gogol’s wild live show can work even a theater full of freshly showered, deodorant-wearing Americans into a stinking, sweaty riot.

Last year’s Super Taranta! was a fun mishmash of gypsy music, rock, and cabaret. But it’s the band’s raucous live shows that truly define it. The multi-cultural collective, led by wildly enthusiastic and overly mustachioed Ukrainian Eugene Hütz, transfers its boundless energy to the crowd like a drunken uncle pouring tumblers of chilled vodka at a wedding. As fun as it is to watch Hütz and his backup singers sprint around the stage and bash on fire buckets, gray-haired fiddler Sergey Ryabtsev often steals the show with his evocative violin lines and winking swagger.