Rocky road

Edmonton’s Shout Out Out
Out Out make Zeppelin fans dance

EMBRACING ADVERSITY: Shout Out Out Out Out

by LORRAINE CARPENTER

If Nik Kozub had his way, Shout Out Out Out Out would be conquering the U.S. one dive bar at a time. Since 2006, he and Jason Troock, Lyle Bell, Will Zimmerman, Clint Frazier and Gravy (that’s right, just “Gravy”) have been hauling a “big mountain” of “real-deal synths” across Canada and earning fans at every stop, not to mention a Juno nomination for their debut album, Not Saying/Just Saying. They’ve won over audiences annually at the SXSW festival in Austin, and in cultural hotspots like NYC. But being from Edmonton (where they also run the Nrmls Wlcm label and Lyle and Gravy moonlight as the drum & bass & rock duo Whitey Houston), they long to connect with their flyover brethren to the south. And with their particular brand of raucous electronic music, bashed into even better shape on their second LP, Reintegration Time, they know they could do it. What’s holding them back (though perhaps only temporarily) is being locked into typical touring routes that revolve around the coasts, an especially tough pattern to break for bands with the “electronic” tag.

The Mirror reached Kozub in Buffalo, where half the band was holed up in a hotel waiting for the other half to return from Toronto with their repaired van, to discuss the glamour of the road.

Mirror: What’s the worst gig you’ve ever played?

Nik Kozub: Oh man, there’ve been some doozies for sure. There is one city that we don’t go back to anymore ’cause there’s just bad blood. Every time we’ve gone there, somehow the club has managed to wire the PA wrong, and as soon as we start playing, a speaker explodes and they try and charge us for it and wind up stealing our mics and there’s no one at the show and there’s no heat in the venue. But we also have a tendency to embrace what may seem like adverse situations. Ideally, we’d want to be playing huge shows in front of 1,000 people, but if we show up and the gig is in the living room of some weird frat house and there’s eight people there, well, we usually make the best of it and have a good time.

M: What do you make of the notion that electronic music doesn’t fly in the so-called flyover states and provinces? Does your experience suggest otherwise?

NK: We’ve found that we actually appeal to people that are not really electronic music fans. Considering where we’ve come from and the way that we interpret writing electronic music, whether we want to or not, we can’t really help but also be a rock band. We’re not doing it consciously, but that crossover appeal has really helped us. In our own hometown, there’s guys I know who would never go see a DJ and would never listen to an electronic album, dudes that collect Zeppelin records, just strictly rock guys, that will still come to our shows and buy t-shirts. I guess we exist in some kind of odd middle ground. If someone is gonna be an ambassador for electronic music for people who don’t like electronic music, then we’re gonna be the one.

WITH TMDP AND FEMME AT IL MOTORE
ON SATURDAY, OCT. 24, 9:30 P.M., $15