Ropechain

Release date: November 4, 2008

Recognizing the presence of a particularly assertive muse, David Adamson cancelled a weekend of shows to sit at home in a dank basement, writing and recording a string of songs that seemed to arise spontaneously. Granting them his full attention, a week of intense composition and arrangement bore Grampall Jookabox’s second album: Ropechain.

After the ominous, trembling, synthetically angelic choral intro on the first track of Ropechain, Jookabox breaks in with a vision that sounds like a bizarre hybrid of a P Diddy rap video and ancient cosmology; “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.”

One of Ropechain’s themes is the paranormal. Says Adamson,“I was interested in paranormal experiences, because I guess I was having them or something? I don’t know. Definitely some weird shit was happening.” Listeners may be inclined to agree. On the album’s third cut, “Ghost,” dirge-like vocals evoke Casper keening through an old time radio about the simultaneous omniscience and heartbreaking tunnel-vision of the dead in soft, helium-pitched whispers.