Boban Markovic Orkestrar/Warsaw Village Band

The popular image of Eastern European folk--insofar as one exists--does not bode well. Fat men mewling drunkenly over wheezing accordions...lanky-haired perestroika relics in John Lennon glasses...not pretty. And in the homelands of both Boban Markovic's Serbian-Gypsy brass army and Polish folk-punks Warsaw Village Band, reality has often been even worse. In Serbia, a wacko neo-fascist genre called "turbo-folk" enjoyed a Milosevic-era vogue. Poland's Communist regime perfected "fakelore," an empty-headed concoction of ye olde kountry klichés and proletarian twaddle.

These albums pulverize stereotype and rescue music from political prison with the simplest weapon around: volume.

Boban Markovic is apparently the don of Serbo-Gypsy music's Coppola family. His son Marko is a champion horn player, and together they orchestrate a furious storm of brass and rhythm. Bred down in the lands where Balkan, Germanic, Gypsy and Turkish traditions mingle, Markovic's sound is a mongrel yard-dog: Spicy-hot lines of Arabic melody ride oompah-ing Austrian beats; Serbian wails rip across the sky. Take that, cultural purists!

Unlike Markovic, who directly inherited his region's music tradition, the Polish kids in Warsaw Village Band had to dig theirs up. They learned an array of near-extinct traditional string and percussion instruments, and three female vocalists taught themselves "white singing," a scream used by Polish shepherds in days of yore. Coupled with heathen thunder from the band's two-man drum corps, this Slavic shriek turns pastoral polka tales of country weddings into hair-raising witch-summonings. Like the Markovic family, the Warsaw Village Band isn't just reviving ancient sound out of the goodness of its heart--it is determined to rock in the process. (Zach Dundas)