For those comfortable with 1’s and 0’s, RillBruh will be the most convenient and cost-effective way to become familiar with the sound of ghetto-folkster, Grampall Jookabox. This free digital EP contains several remixes and out-takes from two or so years of musical development leading up to Grampall Jookabox’s second album Ropechain. In addition, RillBruhalso contains one compelling selection from the said album, titled a “The Girl Ain’t Preggers”. Possibly more than any other track on Grampall Jookabox’s Ropechain, “The Girl Ain’t Preggers” has the absolute sincerity and unselfconscious authenticity of an old time blues song, yet somehow regurgitated in a way that sounds more akin to the club music of the future.  The elusive tribal, trashcan-banging musical accompaniment to the song’s story smacks of raw, primeval tang.  Old time handclapping, hip-smackingly drive the percussion over which the strings and vocals flow and flower in unpredictably pleasing harmonies.

The lyrical narrative deals with a man who is at first terrified that his girlfriend might be pregnant, who spends most of the song coming up with reasons why a baby would be totally inconvenient and most likely disastrous considering his economic situation and lifestyle.  By the end of the song, however—by the time that the scare is over and the potential pregnancy has been neutralized as a threat—there is the sharp pang of regret and even a sort of sense of loss that this purely hypothetical: accidental life bodied forth by fear and the delay of menstruation will not be unfolding into a real body, into a real baby that the narrator would then have been forced to deal with and to love.  This is a situation that more than a few of us in the listening audience have been faced with before.

Though there is no indication that these songs strive to be user-friendly, RillBruh in the end becomes danceable, clappable, emotionally resonant, and bound to produce in the listener a certain, strange sense of recognition and sympathy.

Download whole album here (47mb).