Kultur Shock Brings Balkan Insanity to Chop Suey This Saturday

In the era of Gogol Bordello, Balkan Beat Box, and Beirut, artists borrowing from the library of Southeast European trad are in abundance. Unfortunately, most of them don’t do it well, which is precisely why Kultur Shock, Seattle’s own Balkan art punk outfit, is a can’t-miss band when they take the stage at Chop Suey this Saturday night, March 6, for one of their all-too-rare hometown appearances (with Orkestar Zirkonium and Chervona; tickets $12 advance, 21+).

Formed in Seattle a decade ago by Gino Srdjan Yevdjevich, a former Yugoslav pop star and theatre artist who fled the siege of Sarajevo with the help of Joan Baez and other Western artists, the group has evolved from a trad outfit playing restaurants to a powerhouse of a rock outfit that borrows as much from Macedonian gypsy tunes as Black Sabbath.

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Most bands who claim to be “big in Europe” would be feeding you a line, but in Kultur Shock’s case it’s the God’s truth. Last year, the band played more shows in Istanbul than Seattle, and even took a month-long summer tour of Russian music festivals. Relentless touring in Europe, anchored in the band’s home turf of the Balkans and supported by the diaspora throughout the rest of the continent, has earned them a fanatical fanbase.

Yevdjevich’s incredible vocal range is supported by a muscularly talented musical outfit, led by guitarist Val Kiossovski, a former Bulgarian prog-rocker who made his way to US in the early Nineties. The rest of the group features a loose lineup of top Seattle musicians, like Amy Denio and Paris Hurley, anchored by the rhythm and bass section of drummer Chris Stromquist and former Sage bassist Guy Davis.

From early albums like FUCC the INS and Kultura Diktatura, on which the band yukked up their immigrant roots, Kultur Shock has developed an increasingly subtle and complex musical approach on display in their last LP, Integration (2009), which documents the strife of immigrants caught between their new Western homes and their traditional culture.

“Now you really look like West Europeans,” Yevdjevich croons on “Guerrilla,” a song about youth struggling to navigate the cultural minefield of their new home countries, “from Deutsch or France or the Nederlands…nobody can tell.” “The Motherland doesn’t understand,” he continues, before the rest of the bands kicks in with a chorus bark of “Integration!”

Lyrical content aside, though, Kultur Shock is one of the most fun, fast-paced, anarchic live shows you can see, and even if Seattle audiences don’t quite rise to the same level of barely-contained anarchy that the band manages in the clubs of Sofia or Zagreb, it’s still likely to be one of the sweatiest, danciest concerts on the bill for March, so if you’ve never seen Kultur Shock before, now is your chance: seriously, this is a band not to be missed.