The Engine Room, 23 August 2009
Where to begin? If you are familiar with Monotonix then you’ll doubtless have heard wild tales about the live performances of the Israeli three-piece. These stories periodically emerge from bamboozled gig-goers who stumble unprepared into one of their visceral live performances. Stories of nakedness, firestarting, headbutting, and pure pandemonium. Stories of the band being banned from half the venues in Israel. Great stories of rock’n’roll madness.
Whatever you may have heard about this band, it does little to prepare you for the reality. For this appearance at The Engine Room, every story you’ve ever heard about the garage rockers becomes self-evidently true within the first five minutes. By that stage the drummer is playing in the middle of the floor surrounded by a baying crowd, the moustachioed singer is perched on a small table by the bar singing in hot pants and knee length socks, and the guitarist is on the bar, playing the kick drum and the guitar at the same time. Immaculately.
And so it goes. Singer Ami Shalev ends up being carried around the venue laid across the top of the kick drum, like some horizontal conquering Caesar being borne triumphantly through the gates of Rome. The band move around the venue, followed by the crowd, who carry parts of the drum kit with them; they eventually end up playing in the gents for a while. And all the while they continue to crank out a relentlessly hypnotic garage groove, while the steam swirls around the band and crowd, who merge into a tumultuous, undulating, sweat-dripping mass.
If all this seems like some kind of comedy performance then you’d be wrong. Yes, it makes you grin incessantly like the class dunce, but only in the same way that you laugh when you go on a great rollercoaster. The smile is partly joy, partly disbelief and partly some sort of adrenaline-induced group frenzy. The fact that the band, amidst all this craziness, manage to play a superb set of music leaves you scratching your head and wondering how all other rock bands are so average, and so dull. When the performance bar gets raised this high, where does that leave everyone else?
Words by Joe Owen
Photography by Lucy Kinsella
