Now You Know: The Old In Out

The Old In Out are do-it-yourself incarnate. Drummer Chris Carroll designed the Blue Note-y cover of their new record, Dance Loud, and singer Mike Turi hand-pasted the labels to 300 black 12-inch sleeves. Turi drew the artwork stamped on the vinyl, the second release from the group’s label, Jersey Fresh.

“We have a very blue-collar mentality toward music,” Carroll (who also drums for Shapes of Future Frames) says over a beer in University Heights. “We go at it, just do our job. We get in and get the fuck out.”

The five-piece captures the straight-ahead garage sound of a time between the Kinks’ heyday and late-’70s CBGB, best conveyed by their cover of the Unusuals’ “I’m Walkin’ Babe.” The album, recorded on two-inch tape at Earthlink Studio in El Cajon with Mike Kamoo (Lights On), hits fast and loud, full of reverb and distortion and Turi hollering about girls, money, cigarettes, and cities.

“It’s just simple song[s] about the good parts of relationships, the bad things, the wanting, the getting, and the awfulness that comes from getting what you want or not getting what you want,” says Turi, who cites the Penetrators (New York’s, not California’s) as a top influence.

The band started two years ago in a garage in Ocean Beach after Turi recuperated from a debilitating spinal disease that floored him for the better part of a year.

“Once I got back on my feet I was, like, all right, I don’t know how much longer I’m even going to be able to do a project like this, so I went for it,” says Turi, whose near-constant back pain doesn’t seem to affect his extroverted stage presence.

Turi once even landed a black and bloody eye from Ryan Bohan’s guitar during an early Sight and Sound show, leading one reviewer to describe their showmanship as “borderline ridiculous.”

“None of us grew up here, but we’ve got a huge amount of support,” says Bohan, who runs a La Jolla coffee shop and fashions jewelry from rare coins. The band gets regular airplay on Tim Pyles’s radio show, inhabits three jukeboxes around town (Small Bar, Hamilton’s, Toronado), and have a song in a Billabong surf video. Brian Rathjen on bass and Rory Truesdale on lead guitar complete the quintet.

Got a wicked pissah new band? Let us know by sending the MySpace thing to barnaby_monk@sandiegoreader.com. We’ll check you/them out for our next installment of “Now You Know.”