Allow myself to quote myself: Back in March, when I caught Tel Aviv garage punk trio Monotonix at South by Southwest, I called the band's performance "one of the best live shows I’ve ever been to" and suggested everyone "elevate this band to must-see status in your notebooks."
Lofty praise.
Do I still stand by it?
Hell yeah, I do.
This band is insane, folks--and, literally, its members might be. When I saw them in Austin, they eschewed the stage they were booked to perform on and instead set up in the middle of the mosh pit that had formed beneath the stage. Really, though, they set up on the crowd, spending an equal amount of their show crowd-surfing (while playing their instruments!) as they did on the ground, running around causing havoc.
The music leaves a little to be desired, sure--it's fairly standard garage punk stuff--but, like all the best punk rock, it's not about the music with these guys. For Monotonix, it's all about attitude. And, yeah, if you want to really delve into it, you can probably determine that there's some sort of unrest-in-the-Middle-East protest going on here. But the show is so incendiary, you don't care--and you won't care. You'll be too busy joining in (or running from) the revelry.
When I came back from my SXSW trip in March, I bumped into John Iskander of Parade of Flesh booking and just raved about the show--so much so that I promised him that, should he book Monotonix to play Dallas, I would write about the show. It was more of a dare than anything else: I didn't think Iskander would find a club willing to host such an explosive, dangerous live show.
But he did, thanks to his newfound relationship with the folks at The Lounge. Unfortunately, though, the booking came late last week, so I wasn't able to fully tout this show in our print edition.
Still, John's been good enough to pass along a free pair of tickets for us to give away to one of our blog readers. So, on that note, the first person to email me with "Israeli Punk!" in the subject line gets the tickets. Starting right this very second.
Try and win 'em. But even if you don't, check out this show. This has the potential to be the best show we'll see in Dallas all year. Or it'll be a complete and utter trainwreck.
Either way, though, that's pretty entertaining.
Update: Contest is over. Congrats to our winner. --Pete Freedman
