Directed by Nate Pommer. From Seekers & Finders, out now on Cooking Vinyl.
Eugene Hütz and Regina Spektor are two of the most charismatic performers working today. If you’ve seen them in concert you know you can’t take your eyes off them. And now they’ve made a video for the song they recorded together.
Director Nate Pommer says, “The live footage was shot at The Fonda Theater on March 5th, 2018; an especially epic bonanza-tronic show featuring the transcendent Regina Spektor. Footage of the performance was combined with a series of curated images related to Alchemy, Hermeticism, and esoteric knowledge. The message is open to interpretation, but we can agree that understanding ‘The Ultimate Truth’ requires a set of tools more powerful than reason or intellect.”
I don’t know anything about the ultimate truth, but I know I would’ve like to have been at the Fonda Theater on March 5!
The Orb is back to celebrate its 30th anniversary with a new album full of collaborations with a wide range of artists including Youth, Jah Wobble, Roger Eno, Guy Pratt, Michael Rendall, Roney FM, and the new single features Merge recording artist Hollie Cook.
I spent a lot of time in the 90s listening to the Orb’s “Little Fluffy Clouds” on repeat while studying the patterns in nature. If you look closely enough you can find all kinds of designs and sequences within individual blades of grass or pebbles of sand. I could stare at the sky for hours. And the clouds would catch the colors everywhere. It’s neat.
On the Fourth of July in 1991 President George H.W. Bush came to my hometown to watch our parade. My friends and I thought it would be a good idea to take part in this historical event, so we got an older brother to drop us off downtown. We never made it to the parade because we got distracted, opting instead to hang out in a little park with an Apollo space capsule. There was Secret Service everywhere, on top of roofs, armed with binoculars and sniper rifles. It was quite a scene. We eventually got hungry and decided to walk to Arby’s, a little disappointed that we had missed the parade and hoping we didn’t run into any of our parents. Independence Day. As we were crossing a street the police slammed down some barricades in front of us to close off the route. Before we could even figure out what was happening, Secret Service officers surrounded us and the presidential motorcade drove right by. We could clearly see President Bush grinning and waving to us through the bulletproof window of his limousine. We made eye contact. I may have not been a fan of his policies (no blood for oil!), but I was flattered that the President of the United States of America came to us that day. A sense of sincere patriotism overwhelmed me, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t shed a tear.
Listening to the Orb always makes me think of that day.
The Fratellis were one of those bands that nobody took seriously when they released their debut album, Costello Music, but I really liked it. They were a major label band with a song in an iPod ad. It didn’t help, of course, when the Chicago Blackhawks adopted “Chelsea Dagger” as their goal song during their Stanley Cup run in 2010. A bit uncool, yeah?
Still. You gotta love bands from Scotland, and it’s a good album whether or not a bunch of mooky hockey fans sing along with the chorus of a song that may or may not be about falling in love with transvestite prostitute drug addict. Subversive!
I saw them at Lollapalooza 2007 and they were great, and I bought their second album, Here We Stand, when it came out and then stopped paying attention. Apparently, they took a little break after that but have been fairly active again since 2013.
The new song is a disco-inspired jam with “Sympathy for the Devil” woo-ooos and the video is a charming romp through a senior center. We’re all older today than we’ve ever been (and now we’re even older…), and I hope that in twenty years I’m having us much fun as the oldsters in this video.
Gogol Bordello’s Eugene Hütz told Consequence of Sound: “The theme here is a Rite of Passage, or rather its absence of it in our society… However, it is still necessary. So, it’s about putting yourself through a test and demolition of ego where the soul matures. As you know, generally speaking people divide themselves into young and old souls, but how do they get there? By simply aging or mindlessly clicking like-no like buttons? Fuck no. By using their free will and focus to accumulate necessary experience… a pass into a more composed state, if u will…”
I will.
Gogol Bordello plays Riot Fest at 6:35 PM on Saturday, September 16.
