The strains of an accordion that sound like they could have haunted the streets of Paris or played a sea shanty for the fishermen returning with their catches in Breton in one song will turn into the sound of an Irish reel in another. The violin whose bow dances across its strings in a merry fiddle tune on one occasion, will echo the muddy streets of Eastern European Jewish settlements in another. Yet instead of sounding like a collection of unrelated songs, The Zydepunks manage to find the thread that ties them all together.
Even if you can't hear, or make, the musical connection between songs it doesn't matter, because its more the how instead of the what they are doing that brings about the cohesion. Each song, no matter what the tempo, is performed as if it were the most important piece of music that the band ever played. You can't make a violin cry or dance like either Denise Bonis or Ti-Juan do, or an accordion dance like Eve does, or create the rhythm to contain all the music with the precision that drummer Joseph Lilly and base player Scott Potts do if you don't believe in what you're doing.
When playing so many different styles it would be easy to go through the motions, but not once did I get the impression that anybody, either the regular band members or any of the guests who they have sitting in on this recording, are doing anything but throwing themselves heart and soul into every song. It doesn't matter what language the song is in, English, French, Spanish or Yiddish, if they are singing a song in memory of a departed friend ("Song For Mike" and "Long Story Short" are for Michael Frey a friend of the band who was murdered in 2006), or a song about them being evacuated post Katrina ("Dear Molly"), you can hear in the sound of their voices and the intensity of their playing that there's nothing more important to them than playing that song at that moment.
Aside from the fact that they are playing such an exotic mixture of styles and beats, the other thing that makes The Zydepunks so exciting is the punk sensibility they bring to their music. That doesn't meant they play loud and fast all the time, or sound like any of the other cliches that you might want to associate with punk, it means they take each song to the edge. They play with a wild abandon that always seems to be on the verge of descending into chaotic ruin but somehow always manages to stay on course. They are like a ship running before the strongest of winds that keeps threatening to keel over, but because of the skill of the crew they not only stay afloat, but they skim the waves faster and cleaner than you would have thought possible.
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