If I Had the Strength

I'd never considered that Gogol Bordello might be popular in Canada, but Canadian band Lemon Bucket Orkestra prove that the Great White North can do Gypsy punk too. Lemon Bucket Orkestra are a large, Eastern European-influenced band with lots of wind instruments, but the musicians’ overarching role is to support the shouty vocals of singer Mark Marczyk and then play really fast. You know how it goes: ‘Oom-Pah! Oom-Pah! Oom-Pah!’, before a speedy clarinet and accordion come in, followed by the singer's shouting. For teenagers who are out for a good, drunken time on a Saturday night this can be fun, no doubt, but listening at home the entire experience is uninspired and exhausting – beyond some fleet-footed clarinet solos. While the album supposedly has a narrative and theme of being unable to go home again, inspired by a 19th-century Slavic prison song, the performances here are so lacking in subtlety that no meaning of any sort can be found.