Tel Aviv’s Monotonix have a reputation for their back-breaking work ethic – they gig, and they gig, and they gig some more. The sheer energy and persistence necessary to sustain that sort of lifestyle seeps through the pores of Body Language – a short sharp six track album of raucous garage rock’n'roll.
The songs on Body Language have that deceptive simplicity that only acts with a relentless touring schedule ever seem to acquire. Equipped only with one drummer, one guitarist and one vocalist, Monotonix have had to work out ways of making the songs buzz without resorting to sheer weight of sound.
The solution is Yonatan’s fast’n'loose guitar style, which comes across like Kyuss jamming on bluesy rock’n'roll tracks. Body Language is a riff-driven album by necessity, but it doesn’t have the monolithic obsession with heaviness that metal tends to take. Monotonix are all about the groove, baby … groove, a big warm fuzzy tone and impressionistic scatterings of notes, powered by the thump and smack of Ran on drums.
Vocalist Ami must be Tel Aviv’s answer to Iggy Pop; his lyrical style is character-based and slightly surreal, informed by its own unrevealed mythology. Which is a wordy way of saying he just goes off - I get the feeling there’s as much spontaneity and improvisation in Ami’s singing as there is in the rest of the Monotonix experience.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking Monotonix are a one-trick pony, though – they play dirty rock’n'roll, for sure, but that’s a big beach umbrella to sit beneath. The title track “Body Language” has an almost prog-rock mid-section, a sort of understated abstract noodling, while “Deadly Weapon” starts off like detuned desert rawk before turning into high-speed fun-house acid punk. If anything, the most surprising thing about Body Language is the diversity of ideas it contains.
But there’s a unifying theme that runs all the way through, and it’s completely inescapable – Monotonix are all about having fun and working up a sweat. At not quite twenty-four minutes in length, Body Language is about as long as the average support slot at a live show, and it packs a lot a lot of grin-inducing rock’n'roll into those six songs. It may be a short album, but it’s also very sweet - consider it unreservedly recommended.
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: Body Language, fuzz, garage, Monotonix, noise, punk, rock, rock'n'roll
