Rickshaw Stop // San Francisco, CA // January 28
Monotonix is out of control in the most entertaining way possible. First off, the band doesn’t use stages; instead they set up their drum kit right in front of the stage and use it as a stand for their two Marshal half stacks. Monotonix is in constant motion throughout their set and I’m not just talking about the singer, Ami Shalev, crowd surfing for 90% of the show. Every once in a while drummer Haggai Fershtman would decide to get up and move his drums to another area on the dance floor. He did this about four times, eventually ending up about 50 feet from the stage, playing with his bass drum propped against the bar so it wouldn’t slide away when he kicked it. As for guitarist Yonatan Gat, he spent most of his time either playing on the sound engineer’s stage, on top of the bar, or being carried around the dance floor by about 20 people.
The exuberance a Monotonix performance is unlike any other, and is definitely due mostly to their 46-year-old front man. Within 15 minutes of starting, Shalev scaled the 20-foot balcony and jumped off into the crowd. For a while, he hopped on top of the bar and started singing, and while he was up there he emptied a trashcan onto Fershtman’s head. He then got a hold of the soda dispensing hose behind the bar and started dousing the audience in various types of carbonated beverages. Finally, Shalev ended the show by stacking the drum kit on top of itself in the middle of the dance floor and throwing the floor tom from the stage into his drum pyramid. Out of control and wonderful.
-Daniel Hills