It aired back in 2007, but I still vividly remember the end of VH1's documentary "NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell", when the talking heads were mulling over what had become of the formerly dangerous and tawdry Times Square, placed in contrast to that historically accursed year. "They turned it into Indianapolis," Jimmy Breslin succinctly said. And more or less, here you go: Aside from David Letterman and the Colts, Indy gets a bad rap, when it gets a rap at all. And sure, whatever. Indy can serve as a stand-in for generic urbanity, and it does more or less sell itself as the midwest's cleanest, cheapest convention town. At the same time though, Indy's the 14th largest city in the country. Outside of downtown-- which the chamber of commerce cleans up like the city's living room when guests come over-- there are more than a few unkempt corners.
David "Moose" Adamson, as Jookabox (now without the "Grampall") hails from the East side of Indy, which is known both for the historic neighborhood Irvington-- which Adamson refers to as "the Irv"-- and as one of the city's areas of benign neglect. Boarded-up former businesses, neglected slumlord-owned rentals, higher-than-average crime and poverty rates: you know the drill. My uncle used to jokingly tell out-of-towners he was from "India-no-place," as a way of acknowledging the sort of cultural invisibility that guys like Breslin attribute to Indy. On his latest album, Dead Zone Boys, Adamson seems to take up that sense of inconspicuousness and civic inattention, and redefine it as supernatural: "Dead zone boys wish to take your life away, and the desperate phantoms wish to put you in their place."
Sonically, Boys more or less picks up where Ropechain left off, but shapes that album's slapdash collection of half-formed songs and killer loops into something bordering on a B-movie soundtrack-- Adamson's own small-scale Escape From New York maybe. Jookabox is still only half-sane, but this time there's more of a method to the madness. He gets Stockholm Syndrome with his phantasmic captors on the compelling back-to-back opening tracks, before later resorting to the artillery on the grisly guitar freakout "Gonna Need the Guns/Doom Hope". Sheet-metal boom-bap rhythms underscore "East Side Bangs/East Side Fade", a zombiefied extended metaphor for staying positive in the face of evil temptations, and "You Cried Me" is a sped-up hoe-down complete with helium-voiced werewolf-style howls, in which he convinces a girl to come with him to the underground. It doesn't take much: "Now we can be together forever, you and me livin' side by side. In an evil way! Okay? All right!"
The first half of Boys has all of the action, and the second side can't help but drag a bit, namely the phoned-in "Zombie Tear Drops" and the bluesy meditation "Evil Guh". And like any cheesy drive-in feature worth taking your date to, Boys lets love win in the end, but on its own horny terms. Closing track "F.I.T.F. #1" stands for "Faith in the Fucking", and Adamson delivers that refrain in a gas-huffing slo-mo patois. It feels leftover from Ropechain, sure, but it works well here as a closing-credit sequence. So, here we have it: Adamson drops the "Grampall," and sheds most of *Ropechain'*s "fidgety surburban druggie" tendencies as well. In their place, a new schtick more in line with that of Hoosier TV legend Sammy Terry, the host of a long-running weekly horror flick showcase that bore his name. Sure, he's kitsch now, but that low-budget Vincent Price routine still spooked the shit out of me when I was a kid. Different medium: no matter. That's an Indy indie legacy to follow.
