Review – Abandoman: Moonrock Boombox
Okay, imagine the following hip hop artifacts: gold chain, jet-black shirt emblazoned with a star and the number 85, ragged stubble and a buzz cut. Got it? Good.
Now, slap it all onto a squishy, rosy-cheeked Irishman with a twinkle in his eye and a kindly smile. That, right there, is an Abandoman. He might not be your typical hyper-masculine gangsta rapper, but comedian Rob Broderick’s creation certainly knows how to rhyme it up with the best of them.
Like a charlatan psychic, Rob gently coaxes audience members to reveal personal details, from which he channels not dead spirits but the most astounding improvisational wordsmithery. A typical example was a request for middle-class issues to frame an aggressive NWA-style track around, resulting in a hilariously ludicrous rap diatribe about someone noisily blending fruit while their housemate is trying to watch Entourage.
With the enthusiastic James Hancox providing guitar and back-up vocals (hard to do when you don’t know where the lead is going next), Rob time and time again manages to not just make up rhymes but actually develop coherent narratives brimming with inspired lyrical twists and turns.
If there’s one criticism to be made of the show, it is the offering of A-grade talent inexplicably wrapped in D-grade production values. There are surely only a handful of people on the planet capable of pulling off anything like Moonrock Boombox, yet the bare basics are completely fumbled. Ugly lighting utterly nullifies the beautiful quirkiness of the Idolize Spiegeltent, and the sound mix is literally painful to listen to. These things aren’t hard: certainly not as difficult as, say, making up breathtaking multilayered poetry on-the-fly about the roar of blending fruit drowning out the TV. Regardless, you can get lighting and sound that doesn’t tear at the fabric of your soul any old time: this here Abandoman is worth every wince. His ability to instantly weave together a tapestry of suggestions is truly something to behold, and how he doesn’t paint himself into corners is anyone’s guess.
Perhaps the psychic comparison was on the money: it all really does seem a bit supernatural.
