"Wow," said my friend, himself a world music clarinetist, as we listened to the opening of People's Spring, the Warsaw Village Band's debut collection of "'Hardcore Folk' from Poland" and watched the lights of Manhattan's skyline twinkle on across the river amidst a chemical-endowed sunset, "I can't believe they opened with a doyna." Now, I have no idea what a doyna is but, based on the way my friend smiled and nodded when the ponderously meandering plucked string and spare percussion opening of "To You Kasiunia" finally sprung to life in a hail of folded-over reverb-laden trumpets and violins and voices, I can make a guess. "They love their reverb," my friend marveled.

And why not? For once it serves its purpose, drenching the music in the effect not to make it sound cool so much as weird. For a group that wishes to preserve the spirit, if not entirely the sound, of their country's native music, it's a useful tactic. "Kasiunia" eventually sputters to a close with trumpets running up and down scales deep inside the echo cloud. For all this, though - at least to American ears - the Warsaw Village Band ain't exactly The White Stripes of Polish roots music, though perhaps they are to Polish ears. As their press release carries on about (but, unfortunately, not the liner notes to the album itself), the Warsaw Village Band attempts to reclaim its heritage from its appropriation by Communist "fakelore" over the bulk of the 20th century.

Like Jack White, they revel in both the accidental modernity of their country's ancient songs ("Who Is Getting Married" is a "feminist composition, an example of contemporary ideas on emancipation, which apparently existed in the former Polish countryside") and their inherent power of strangeness ("Maydów" is a "dark and psychedelic erotic folk song") to draw them into an associative present: the past is weird and cool, these songs from the past demonstrate something about the present, thus, the present is also weird and cool. News-like liner note descriptions ("A girl loses cows while in a pasture. A lucky finder demands sexual reward," per "Clear Water") ring of the short summaries alchemist crank Harry Smith gave to the numbers on his Anthology of American Folk Music ("Manufacturers proud dream destroyed at shipwreck. Segregated poor die first," per "When That Great Ship Went Down," about the Titanic).

But the real strangeness isn't in the songs, at least for American chumps like me. The music itself - found on a label called "World Village" (a fairly normal product of the '90s cultural revolution) - sounds pretty much exactly as one would expect music from Poland to sound. It sounds, frankly, exotic. It sounds like Gypsy music (though my friend, who plays actual Gypsy music in addition to Polish music, would probably kill me for saying so). The point is: I couldn't, off-hand, differentiate between these different types of music, and I certainly can't differentiate within this type of music (such as to identify the beginning of the album as a doyna), but I can listen to it and watch as the light creeps through the still-barren trees outside my window. That's good and weird, but to know that it - and, presumably, a lot of the other ubiquitous "world" music ("Earth music," as another friend calls it) that dots the soundscape - is even, um, gooder and weirder.

The lyrics here are in a foreign language, obviously, which comes off as another blurred layer of music. Invested with mysterious meaning, they become a little more ominous. What if everything that seemed familiar but un-decoded had such creepiness behind it? It's not scary so much as idiosyncratic. And, as chaotic as it gets in places, it's not resonant nearly as often as its cold and dreary, like the first signs of life cracking through the cement in an abandoned Communist Bloc-era factory town.