David "Moose" Adamson's third full-length release under the
Grampall Jookabox (newly shortened to just "Jookabox") moniker covers much of the same ground as its predecessors, amiably mixing the wry, sophomoric, pitch-shifted vocal attack of
Pod-era
Ween with the white-boy beats of
Beck and
Har Mar Superstar. Like 2008's
Ropechain,
Dead Zone Boys revels in the kind of thick, two-dimensional sounds that populate most home-recorded projects, and its to
Adamson's credit that the manages to balance the sludge with some truly inspired vocal takes and enough homemade clicks, clangs, and industrial (as in bombed-out machine shops and liquor stores) atmospherics to score an apocalyptic, Indianapolis-based first-person shooter, which is kind of what
Dead Zone Boys feels like. Albums like this pretty much ask you right away to either turn it up or throw it out, and there's no denying the polarizing nature of D.I.Y. indie rock, but
Jookabox is consistently visceral, darkly funny, and wholly unpredictable enough to warrant more than a cursory spin around the neighborhood.