Shout Out Out Out Out Not Saying/Just Saying

With electronic music spanning from surreal austerity to the rambunctious hedonism of club trax, it's easy to throw Shout Out Out Out Out under the dance-punk umbrella. Though definitively dance-laden, they stop at what would constitute the latter - this band throws obsequious lyrics into their crayon box of explosive discontent.

Flashing cover art by Alberta-music prodding acolyte Chad VanGaalen, Shout Out Out Out Out hail from Edmonton, Alberta. Though presumably one of the most absurd places to produce a turbo-synth dance outfit, the consideration of Alberta's cold, gloomy stasis brings this premature conclusion full circle. The prairies are a prison, in which her inhabitants must refulgently trudge for six frigid months of the year. Aware that sometimes the people are claustrophobic enough to be erratic, Shout Out Out Out Out come to the rescue with a boisterous treasure box of sound. Let the beats come down like comets from a resurrected Atari.

Logging into their rambunctious debut with a lyrical consciousness that juxtaposes their hard-pressed musical demands, Not Saying/Just Saying doesn't gesture, it pulls. Almost every song cocoons a clap, and the album's signature vocoder tumbles out electrified vocals while raking up titles like Your Shitty Record Won't Mix Itself, Chicken Soup for the Fuck You and Do I Stutter?

Ripe with the album's mathematically synchronized collisions, the opening track Forever Indebted storms to awaken an army of lemmings on a flashing rainbow chequerboard dance floor. The track's relentless fervour eventually breaks into a hastening mantra for the working class, signing off with the inauspicious denouement "Why do you think they fuckin' advertise... I'm in an awkward place/and I'm out of time". This dance-saturated awareness continues into They Tear Down Houses Don't They?, which tip-toes its way up a scale with a funky, deep ascension. While addressing a groovy moonwalk soundtrack, the song candidly addresses the (!) compromised ethics of building residential infrastructure. Vicious clapping takes the lead in the incessant, vocally void Chicken Soup for the Fuck You, before quickly collecting a heavy, looping, guitar riff. By the time the erratic Caribbean drum is kicking like a steel-toed boot, the song has concocted a perpetual energy from all the instrumental support it's tossed in its wagon.

Not Saying/Just Saying signs off by refracting its beats into the gently ominous snow of Do I Stutter?. In its glamorous glide through chopped words, the prodding synth is sturdied by the metronomic effect of a gargantuan concrete block being pushed across pavement (when in doubt, check your headphones). Buoyantly hypnotic, the track floats like Huxley's million soma-ites. The song never breaks, never climaxes, and bows down the album into a delicate, residual departure.

Besides this softened composure to the album's otherwise effervescent conundrums, Shout Out Out Out Out make the kind of music that would suffocate a pub, emancipate a bar, and parade a stadium. Alas, there is only one thing we can be sure of as we carry 9-5 in our backpockets: hail the synthesizer on the way to the club and break shit on the dance floor.