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Fun Fun Fun review: Monotonix
Tammy Perez FOR AMERICAN-STATESMANIf you’ve ever wandered over to the Pfluger Pedestrian Bridge at 3 a.m. in the morning during South by Southwest or Chaos in Tejas, for one of the bridge’s storied early-morning punk rock freakouts, you’d have felt right at home at the yellow stage on Saturday afternoon. Tel Aviv punk rock trio Monotonix cranked out their loose, fast, frenetic sounds not from the stage but from the ground. And with amplification minimal and the crowd blocking the view of the performers, the rules for spectators were much the same as they are on those pedestrian bridge shows — if you had any desire to see what was going on, you essentially needed to be 20 feet from the band.
But if you were 20 feet from the band, you were treated to one of the most insane sets of a festival defined by its insanity. It’d be inaccurate to say that Monotonix play sterling, particularly memorable songs — it’s sloppy rock, fun but perfectly ordinary — but what they lack in mind-blowing musicianship they make up for in raw, sweaty spectacle. Shortly after blasting through the incredibly appropriate “Fun Fun Fun” — a 7-inch single released earlier this year and drawn from an upcoming full-length produced by Steve Albini — shirtless, sweaty frontman Ami Shalev climbed to the top of nearby boulder for an enthused take on “Body Language.” Perched on the top — and elevated a good six feet above the heads of the audience below him — Shalev motioned that he was going to jump.
“There’s a fifty-fifty chance I may die,” he beamed before taking the plunge. Fortunately, he didn’t, and after that it was easy to imagine that the enraptured Fun Fun Fun crowd would have followed him to the ends of the Earth. Or at least to the nearby Eurobounce, the bungee jump contraption where Monotonix finished its set, shortly after Shalev had played a drum while seated in a chair held up by the audience, as though he was in some sort of punk rock Bar Mitzvah circle dance.
Completely and utterly ridiculous? Indeed. A whole lot of fun? Obviously.
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