Good for sure on disc, but you'll love 'em live

Despite all the negative chatter the issue of immigration generates, the fact is that Americans love the trial-and-error tragicomic saga of fresh-off-the-boat immigrants who try to fit like square pegs into America's round hole.

The latest proof is the runaway success of the movie Borat. Before there was Borat, there was Taxi's Latka Gravas, Andy Kaufman's lovable mechanic of mysterious Eastern European descent. In between, there was, and for that matter is, Gogol Bordello, led by human-cannonball front man Eugene Hütz, perhaps best known for his role as Alex in the movie version of Everything Is Illuminated.

Like Latka and Borat, Hütz - a native of Ukraine residing in New York - makes his art out of the joys and miseries of assimilating into a strange and foreign land.

Backed by his five-piece self-described gypsy-punk band, which includes a fiddler and an accordionist, Hütz had a capacity crowd at the Trocadero on Thursday night in a constant state of mosh, despite sweat-lodge conditions.

The Balkan equivalent of the Pogues, Gogol Bordello combines an iconic Eastern European folk sound - which itself combines elements of bolero and flamenco - with the iconoclastic swagger of punk. The band's irreverent take on tradition is perhaps summed up best in the chorus of the opening track to their new album, Super Taranta, which goes: "There never were any 'good old days,' they are today they are tomorrow, it's a stupid thing we say, cursing tomorrow with sorrow."

While Super Taranta marks the band's fourth proper album, Gogol Bordello is best experienced live - ideally while drunk on the wine of life, if nothing else. Gogol's vibe is that last hour of the wedding reception when everyone is sweaty and untucked and feeling no pain. The band is all about circus-like spectacle, thanks in no small part to the gravity-defying gymnastics of nubile dancer/percussionists Pam Racine and Elizabeth Sun.

However, the center of the show is undeniably Hütz, who arrived onstage looking like Lemmy Kilminster covered in honey and shot from a cannon through Nils Lofgren's wardrobe. His red pirate shirt didn't make it past the third song, and by the fifth song, "East Infection," he had already split his skintight bumblebee-striped pants.

Hütz brought down the house with "Start Wearing Purple" - which, in a better world, would be the national anthem of novelist Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan - and had everyone, and I do mean everyone, dancing like a Cossack.

As Borat would say: Veddy nice.