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Craftiness, when it’s this imaginative, can go a long way and for Jookabox, these bizarre ideas seem to work even when they shouldn’t.
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Adamson mixes genres and sounds, blending and pitch-shifting, looping and deconstructing to create his most focused (though it may not sound that way on first listen) effort to date.
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I'm all for musicians not taking themselves too seriously, but with such audacious, irreverent, and yet captivating material populating the bulk of the album, it is a supreme letdown to finish on such strangely muddled notes. Still, Dead Zone Boys is worth some serious attention.
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The first half of Boys has all of the action, and the second side can't help but drag a bit.
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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.
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The Ween/Animal Collective/early-Beck thing works on Don’t Go Phantom and You Cried Me, but you have to stomach Jookabox’s tendency to chipmunkify their voices. Still, both tracks are enjoyably balanced.
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The record provides songs as unpredictable as the one proceeding it, incorporating multi-layered doses of percussion, fat synths, and ritualistic chanting that sounds as if it was yelped by Animal Collective’s evil step-sister.