Get Out Saturday: Kultur Shock @ Chop Suey

When the Crocodile Cafe abruptly closed down a month ago, we turned to a friend of ours looking for the inside scoop. Kultur Shock guitarist Val Kiossovski was bar manager down for quite a while (he's now running his own place in Lower Queen Anne, Solo, one of our favorite hangouts), so we figured if anyone knew, he would. Unfortunately, he was busy with problems of his own: rescheduling his band's show.

Kultur Shock became one of the first bands, suddenly without a venue, relocated to Chop Suey, where they take the stage this Saturday, Jan. 19. And in all the confusion, the promotion has sort of fallen by the wayside. So, for the record, this Saturday's show is a release party for the band's new album, Live in Bulgaria.

The first drop since 2006's We Came to Take Your Jobs Away, Live in Bulgaria was recorded at a show in Sofia, Bulgaria, back in 2006, and mixed by legendary Seattle producer Jack Endino, who also produced their album Kultura-Diktatura. Fans wanting a piece need to show up to the concert; from what we understand, a national release is pending a new label/distributor. But from what Val tells us, the concert was phenomenal, which surprised even the band since the event was sponsored by a whisky distillery who kept them nice and drunk from the radio promos in the morning to the time they stumbled off stage.

We won't go into depth about the band's background (feel free to check out our March '07 interview), suffice it to say for the uninitiated out there that Kultur Shock is comprised of members from Japan to Bosnia, and fronted by a man who was the Balkans' answer to Duran Duran in an early career phase. The band's sound lies somewhere between Gogol Bordello and System of a Down (think harder than GB, and funner and less pretentious than System) and, for the record, they put on a fantastic show. Not something to miss.

Kultur Shock @ Chop Suey // Sat. Jan. 19, 9 pm // $10 adv // 21+