Monotonix – The Garage, London, 24/08/09

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This isn’t a gig… this is madness.

My first experience with the force of Nature that is Monotonix was at a Silver Jews show, where the Tel Aviv trio delivered a supremely memorable support set which involved drum kits that migrated across the venue, audience members’ pints being flung across the room and lead singer/psycho Ami Shalev leaping off the ULU balcony with the kind of reckless abandon that makes Tim Harrington look like Enya. If anything, this headline show elevated the insanity to even more extreme levels, leaving few entirely unscathed.

Perhaps wisely, the proprietors of the newly-renovated Garage booked them into the smaller upstairs room, where they presumably could do less damage to the fixtures. Cataloguing the chaos that ensued is quite the formidable task but amongst other frenzied antics that would send your average delicate indie-type running for the hills, Mr. Shalev and co. were responsible for:

- lifting up young ladies and manhandling them across the room
- crowd-surfing atop a bass drum, Eugene Hutz-style
- delivering kisses to bemused male audience members
- repeatedly mooning the crowd
- performing drum solos on a floor-tom whilst held aloft by members of the audience
- persuading the whole room to sit down whilst he rambled incomprehensibly about the Queen
- inordinate amounts of crowd-surfing.

They’re not a band to care much for anything so prissy as ‘stages’- even in their more reserved moments (ie. when they’re not actively accosting the audience) they adopt a middle-of-the-crowd configuration that’d be familiar to any fan of Lightning Bolt, and even those who briskly retreated towards the back to avoid the full force of the madness were never entirely safe. I faintly recall there was also a musical element to proceedings, raucous punk rock with occasional hints of traditional Jewish influences but frankly, it was rather overshadowed by everything else. More an “experience” than a bona-fide musical performance, Monotonix’s live show comes highly recommended- though you may get more eyefuls of Israeli arse-crack than you’d otherwise wish to see.

Photos by Anika Mottershaw