Monotonix, Call Me Lightning, and Juiceboxxx at High Noon Saloon
Joe Engle
Opener Juiceboxxx (left), and the Monotonix mayhem.
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Before laying waste to the High Noon Saloon Thursday night, the three men of Monotonix paused to show off their duds: Singer Ami Shalev looked like a lunatic American Apparel model in a tattered leotard, while drummer Haggai Fershtman donned Badger-red short shorts with “WISCONSIN” emblazoned across the back. By the time the swaggering opening number “Summers And Autumns” was over, Shalev had mooned the crowd, shoved a microphone up his ass, emptied a trashcan onto Fershtman, crowdsurfed with his legs inside the trashcan, and danced on the bar. Treating the High Noon like his own private jungle gym, Shalev went on to straddle the awning over the bar and literally swing from the rafters, much to the approval of the camera-wielding crowd.
The Israeli band's most astounding stunt is to seamlessly disassemble and regroup in another area of the venue—drumkit and all—without interrupting the flow. So it wasn’t long before Shalev returned to the bar, this time with the entire band in tow. While the drums remained on the floor, guitarist Yonatan Gat and Shalev stood atop the bar like demented Coyote Ugly waitresses as the bartenders hurriedly shuttled drinks out of their way. The few they missed were quickly snatched by Shalev, who threw the beers at the adoring crowd and shoved the cocktail ice down his shorts.
The last frontier for all this chaos was clearly the High Noon's balcony, and eventually the band made the inevitable migration up there. Perched above the visibly nervous soundman, Shalev held Fershtman’s cymbals aloft for a verse before diving back into the fray. The enthusiastic crowd ate every bit of it up—between songs, Fershtman simply could not dole out the high fives fast enough.
The nagging question with any show like this is always: What could they possibly do for a closer? Monotonix’s surprisingly utopian answer was to strap Gat's guitar to an unsuspecting audience member, freeing up all three bandmembers to crowdsurf together in the ensuing racket.
Though the headliners came all the way from Tel Aviv, the two opening acts hailed from the comparatively less exotic locale of Milwaukee. Rapper Juiceboxxx wigged out to his iPod like an adolescent alone in his bedroom, dancing on the floor and clambering up a couple nearby fixtures. His energy was admirable, but if Juiceboxxx intended to out-spectacle the headliners, he had a long way to go.
Call Me Lightning have been lying low recently, and taking the stage they looked like a band that had just come out of hibernation. Long-haired, bearded, and with a new bassist, the band bore little resemblance—physically or sonically—to the jittery kids who recorded the indispensable post-punk of 2004 album The Trouble We’re In, or even 2007's Soft Skeletons. Leaning heavily on new material for a forthcoming record, the trio unleashed thunderous mid-tempo rock riffs that skewed more Crazy Horse than Shellac. Singer/guitarist Nathan Lilley name-dropped deceased local club O’Cayz Corral before launching into an extended jam on “Soft Skeletons,” inspiring a lone stage-diver to portend the melee that was to come.
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