GEOFF BERNER

With Orkestrar Slivovika and Joanna Chapman-Smith

When: Saturday, 8 p.m.

Where: WISE Hall, 1882 Adanac

Tickets: $12 in advance at Zulu, Highlife and Red Cat, $15 at the door

VANCOUVER - On his latest album Victory Party (out Tuesday), Geoff Berner sings as much about the celebration as he does about its obligatory hangover period.

For the politically inclined Vancouver-based klezmer accordionist and singer-songwriter, “victory is always mixed with a feeling of loss.

“We all lived through the Bush era,” the former member of the Green Party and Rhinoceros Party says, “and we thought when we were rid of him it would be a grand celebration, and it was. But now we need to rebuild the world that’s been driven into the ditch and we’re still having trouble getting out of that ditch.”

The idea of the “victory party” could also apply to Vancouver’s recent foray into Olympic madness, Berner says.

“That’s a party that had a desperate edge to it. We were all white-knuckled watching it happen. It had to go well, or else.”

In 2008, Berner released his “theme song” for the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games cheekily subtitled The Dead Children Were Worth It!, implying the B.C. government had shut down a coroner’s office responsible for the investigation of children’s deaths to save money for the event.

Victory Party follows in the same vein and retains Berner’s penchant for comedy and satire, but this time the tone is a bit more sombre.

Berner also approached Victory Party much differently than he did his last three albums comprising his critically acclaimed “Whiskey Rabbi trilogy of trio albums”: Whiskey Rabbi (2005), Wedding Dance of the Widow Bride (2007) and Klezmer Mongrels (2008).

All three albums had been recorded as a folk trio format with percussionist Wayne Adams and violinist Diona Davies and were meant to be understood as “live documents.”

For Victory Party, Berner went for a full-studio production approach that would bridge his folk, klezmer and punk tendencies by teaming with Montreal-based producer and klezmer expert Josh (Socalled) Dolgin.

“He just said, ‘I’m not interested in records that represent the live experience. I’m interested in sonic confections that only exist between the listener’s ears,’ ” Berner says. “I thought, ‘My God, I have no idea how to do that.’ The trilogy came from a financially risky trip we did to Romania, so I thought another risk would be a way to make it exciting. And the risk this time was to go to Montreal and put myself in Josh Dolgin’s hands.”

Dolgin’s hands are indeed all over Victory Party, an album that reunites Berner with Davies and Adams and also adds Brigitte Dajczer on violin as well as Brooklynite klezmorim Benjy Fox-Rosen and Michael Winograd on bass and clarinet.

The album is Berner’s first for Vancouver label Mint Records, a label Berner admits he has been dreaming of working with ever since they first released grunge band Windwalker back in the early 1990s.

“This time they said, ‘Yes,’” Berner says with a grin, recalling how they had kindly given him a negative reply every year for the past 10 years. “It just shows to the kids at home trying to make it in the music world that if you patiently keep beavering, they’ll come around after a while.”

On Victory Party, Berner explores folk tales, current affairs and politics, twisting them together in a kaleidoscopic way, critiquing authority (Daloi Polizei), religious fanaticism (Rabbi Berner Finally Reveals His True Religious Agenda) and Jewish political extremism (Oh My Golem) with tongue firmly planted in cheek.

“All the songs are full of serious jokes, jokes that have a lot of thought and worry at the heart of them,” he says. “But it’s also meant to be an entertaining record: It’s a party record where you don’t have to turn your brain off.”

Oh My Golem is certainly the album’s most surprising offering, and a complete sonic departure for Berner.

The song re-imagines the tale of the Golem of Prague — a giant clay man created by a Rabbi to protect the Jewish people — now meaning to represent the conflict between European Jewish intellectual tradition and “crazy Jewish fanatics,” built around a loopy electro beat and multiple layers of klezmer instrumentation.

“I said I wanted it to be ‘horrifying yet catchy,’ and [Dolgin] mentioned ’80s Israeli disco,” Berner says with a laugh. “I said, ‘Yeah, that sounds like what I’m talking about.’ ”

He laughs.

“I really feel like he hit the number on that one.”

Berner, 39, has been digging into klezmer and Jewish folklore for close to 20 years.

With Victory Party, a fully realized album that will soon take him on an extensive tour of Canada and Europe, Berner hopes to just go even deeper.

“I’m only scratching the surface of the scholarship and the treasure trove of culture and beauty that is Jewish music and Yiddish culture,” he says. “I just see this as part of a continuum where my goal as a songwriter is to, through the course of writing these albums, just get a few that might make it into the canon of Jewish song the same way that some of the songs that Shane McGowan made with the Pogues in the ’80s are songs that any Irish band playing anywhere is going to have in its repertoire. ‘Success’ for me is to be part of that conversation. I’m not trying to go to the top of the pop, I’m trying to go further