Dead Zone Boys

Personnel: Rafter (various instruments); Gabriel Sundy (baritone saxophone); Benny Sanders.
Additional personnel: Star Choir (vocals).
Audio Mixers: Rafter; Rafter Roberts.
Recording information: The Benton House, Indianapolis, IN; The Benton House, Irvington, Indianapolis, IN; The Singing Serpent, San Diego, CA.
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 it's to Adamson's credit that he 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.