Jookabox
Dead Zone Boys
(Joyful Noise/Asthmatic Kitty, 2009)

Jookabox is Indianapolis-based musician David “Moose” Adamson and whomever he manages to rope into helping him prepare his demented lo-fi vision. This time it’s drummer Ostry Okerson, who adds a barrage of disturbing percussion effects to the tracks, and two members of another Indianapolis-based band, psycho glam-rock outfit Everthus the Deadbeats: Lisa Berlin on vocals and musical saw, and Benny Sanders on bass.

Last year’s Ropechain was an orgy of feedback and rhythmic noise that had moments of brilliance popping out of a murky mix that often reduced the music to a grinding rhythmic pulse. Dead Zone Boys follows in that album’s murky footsteps with another barrage of distorted instruments that often make it difficult to understand the lyrics. There must be something on the album besides processed vocals, bass drums, and guitar fuzz, but once again, the underwhelming production values turn everything into a sonic mush that veers back and forth between moments that are either oddly brilliant or almost unlistenable.

Let’s deal with the brilliant tracks first. “Don’t Go Phantom” is one of the peculiar love songs that Jookabox is so adept at. The chorus is infuriatingly catchy and delivered by voices that sound like chipmunks high on helium. Distorted guitars and a spastic drumbeat support the verses, which are vaguely religious but mostly incomprehensible. “Zombie Tear Drops” brings to mind the primitive garage band sounds of the late ’60s. Its simple repeated figure is played on a distorted keyboard, and although “zombie tear drops” are the only recognizable words, the song has a throbbing pulse that pulls the listener in. The singers, and that’s using the term “singers” generously, shout and rant along with the beat like a gang of drunken friends in a mumbling contest. “F.I.T.F. #1” is the possible hit, but the title, which is also the chorus, is “faith in the fuckin’”—not exactly something that’s going to get airplay anytime soon, even on college stations. The tune is a catchy pop confection, but Jookabox’s processed vocals speed up and slow down and are, as usual, unintelligible, except for the punch line. I know we call this thing we love “music,” not “lyrics” or “words,” but still, one of the things that imbeds a song in our brains is a clever turn of phrase or a sinuous lyrical line, no matter how meaningless. If you’re taking the time to write and record a song, you’d think you’d allow people to be able to hear what you’re singing, no?

The rest of Dead Zone Boys collapses into a tangle of feedback, garbled vocals, and instrumental noise. The steady, unremitting pulse of “Evil Guh” sounds like a headache feels, the treble-heavy track “You Cried Me” sounds like Hank Williams fronting the Trashmen in Hillbilly Hell, the vaguely reggae-ized tribal funk of “Gonna Need the Guns/Doom Hope” sounds like a studio full of drunken delinquents trying to prove how clever they are, and “Light” is a whirlwind of kaleidoscopic vocal noise with shrieking chipmunk vocals and a deadening backbeat. Dead Zone Boys is allegedly about civilization’s disintegration and the plague of capitalist zombies feeding off the decaying corpse of America’s slowly collapsing economy, but the album sounds like it was made by zombies with its lumbering tempos and the incomprehensible vocals.

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]