Grampali
Jookabox
"Ropechain"
(CD & LP)
Asthmatic
Kitty Records
Review
by Carl Macki
credit: Craig McCormick
TRACK
LISTING
1.
Black Girls
2.
Let's Go Mad Together
3.
Ghost
4.
Old Earth, Wash My Beat
5.
The Girl Ain't Preggers
6.
You Will Love My Boom
7.
I
Will Save Young Michael
8.
The One Thing
9.
We
Know We Might Be Fucked
10.
Strike Me Down
11.
I'm Absolutely Freaked Out
Sometimes
an artist comes along and sets up a
genre even if he seems to
be erasing categories.
If
one can meaingfully speak of hiphop jungle folk punk as a genre then
this
sophomore release by enigmatic David Adamson AKA Grmapali Jookabox is
its defining moment from the
bizarre opening of "Black Girls" with lyrics such as:
“Black
girls walk on tips of
mountains/
Black girls jump seas like they was fountains…
Black girls
build skyscrapers with their brains/
Black girls do shit that I can’t
explain/
But, Black girl won’t you do it again? /
Black girls are built
to walk across the seas/
Black girls convince the icecaps to freeze/
A
black girl was the mamamama of everyone you see.”
A skeptic might scoff -- Grampali
does not mind.
or look back. He encourages us to join him on his crazy wisdom quest,
in "Let's Go Mad Together." Lots of drama in his life, apparently. like
in a fascination with the errie in "Ghost; "The
Girl Ain't Preggers," about a false pregnancy--and onward.
Is this dual
diagnostics confessional time?
Whatever! It seems to work. "You WIll
Love My Boom" is a crack pipe dream of sweetness precisely done in
utmost schizoaffective-distorted fashion. Perhaps one of the
strangest love song apologies I think ever heard is "I WIll Save Young
Michael," about Michael Jackson. I though that case was closed.
Jookabox reopens the whole wardrobe closet. And my mind is still going
through the clothes that have been thrown on the floor in this song. We
may relax in knowing "We Know We Might Be Fucked" -- a happy little
ditty for the circumstances may be dire It rocks like an extra hole in
your head. In short, I just don't know what to make of this. I just
accept it.
By the time I got to "I'm Absolutely Freaked Out,"
Jookabox had won me over. It is original, crazy good, and somewhat
compelling. I am going to keep replaying until
I unlearn more of its rope tricks.
