Stephen Hargreaves
MANAGING EDITOR


SHOUT OUT OUT OUT OUT – Spanish Moss and Total Loss (Normals Welcome)





I’ve listened to Shout Out Out Out Out’s third and newest album three times now and I’m still not sure what to think of it.

It sounds great, and plays into everything thing I like about wonderful vintage synthy music. The recording process included enough analogue synthesizers to make Rick Wakeman blush. The Edmonton-based electro nerds even build a tabletop modular synth out of Mooger Foogers pedals, and if you understand what that is, you’ll understand how incredibly cool that is.

The music itself shows an acute awareness of tonality, with respect to the limitations and cool features of all of the sequencers, synths and machines they are playing with. The mix is near perfect and that may be part of the problem. SO4’s Nik Kozub is an excellent producer, though Spanish Moss and Total Loss’ classic house meets Krautrock sound longs for imperfect production. Glossy Krautrock flirts with prog-rock.

At times, the record comes across like the score to a late disco-era action-romance film … set in space, and if that’s what they were going for, they’ve done very well.

To paraphrase SO4’s 2006 debut record, Not Saying/Just Saying, ‘your shitty record over mixed itself,’ … I think I’m going to listen to that instead.