Earlier this month, Portland Metblogger Geoff Kleinman took a stab at recounting a Monotonix show that he described as “so outrageously amazing that, after it’s over, you begin to doubt if it actually happened.”
“Flying through the air, lead singer Ami Shalev crowd surfs as he sings, pausing only to climb up to a high ledge on the ceiling of the club,” wrote Kleinman. “A trash can is bounced around, water is flying through the air. The hi-hat is kicked over and promptly reset. The guitarist leaps up onto the stage and then jumps back off. Nothing in the room is still. After a few songs the band picks up their instruments and moves them further to the back of the club and the circle of people follow….
Could it be true? YouTube offers further evidence: A drum set set afire at a show in Tennessee, insane crowd-surfing in Texas, a street takeover in Toronto. (Visit this post at Nickellbag.com to see these and other videos.)
The videos mostly suck; and the music - in its live form, anyway - is worse. Yet both only serve to amplify the sense that a Monotonix show promises an experience unlike anything you’ve ever seen at a rock ’n’ roll show.
Even Shalev has a hard time explaining what inspires the insanity that ensues when he gets in front of a crowd.
“The whole thing with fire and moving the drums and all these things, it’s kind of an improvise,” Shalev says, his Israeli accent thick as bong tar. “We get to the show and we never know how it’s going to be ended. We just get the vibe from the room. Sometimes it’s fire, sometimes it’s trash and liquid and drum surfing and going outside into the street. It just depends on what happens during the show.”
Monotonix will perform in Missoula at the KBGA Birthday Bash this Friday, Sept. 26, at the Badlander. Tickets are $5, available in advance at Ear Candy Music and KBGA College Radio, in the University Center (this show will almost definitely sell out, if it hasn’t already). Monotonix will be joined for the show by Portland’s the Bugs, Austin’s Hooch Dupree & the Trapdoor Band, and Missoula’s own Vera and Wartime Blues. Speaking of whom….
LIFE WITH WARTIME
Few local bands have gone through as complete a musical evolution as Wartime Blues. Formed two years ago by college friends Nate Hegyi, Ben Prez, and Sam Luikens, the band originally played a kind of quiet bluegrass music that even Hegyi admits wasn’t the best representation of the songs in his head.
“I think in the early days I had pretty (bad) taste in music,” says Hegyi, the band’s lead vocalist and acoustic guitarist. “We were just doing really simple three- and four-chord song structures with terrible writing on my part. I’ve grown a lot in the last two years.”
Indeed, anyone who last heard the band in its earliest gigs probably wouldn’t recognize the eight-piece acoustic/electric band that is the new Wartime Blues. Building on the contributions of keyboardist Lisena Brown, cellist Bethany Joyce, electric guitarist Jesse Netzloff, bassist Tyler Knapp, and drummer Martin McCain, the band has considerably broadened its musical palette, creating complexly layered folk-rock anthems that owe obvious - and self-admitted - debt to the music of Bob Dylan.
“I discovered Bob Dylan’s ’Highway 61 Revisited,’ and I knew I wanted that ‘thin, wild mercury sound,’” said Hegyi, referring to a 1977 quote from the legendary singer. That said, “We’re always trying to change up the style, so if you saw us four months ago we were a lot different.”
The band’s current sound is aptly documented on “Snowghost Sessions EP,” a four-track CD recorded at Snowghost Studios in Whitefish over the course of four days this past summer. The short album resonates with echoes of Dylan as well as more current mood-rockers such as Iron and Wine and Wilco. “Memorial Day 1968,” with its vibrant acoustic strumming and catchy, wordless refrain, captures the musical spirit of an age that predates the birth of anyone in the band. But who cares if they weren’t there, when the music is this beguiling?
In addition to playing the KBGA Birthday Bash, Wartime Blues will perform at a showcase of Snowghost bands next Tuesday, Sept. 30, at the Palace. Victory Smokes, CarCrashLander, and Themes will also play the show, which costs $5.
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