Monotonix
Where Were You When It Happened?
(Drag City, 2009)

One admirer I know of this feral Tel Aviv power trio gushed about a live show recently where he went home smelling like trash because the band emptied the venue’s trash bins over the audience’s heads. Uh, rock ‘n’ roll? If that’s the experience the title question of their first “full-length” (just minutes longer than last year’s EP debut) refers to, then I’ll gladly answer a few years from now, “at home, not smelling like trash.” But I’ll still be enjoying Where Were You When It Happened? as a wild souvenir someone else who’s braver brought me.

The scuzzy sound of these eight relentless, crackly, distorted yet excellently cut tracks recalls some psychedelic nightmare triangulation of Gov’t Mule, early Soundgarden, and maybe the Jesus Lizard. Their sound is so in-your-face dry, it’s not hard to see why their concert setup (usually on the floor amongst the crowd à la Dan Deacon and Lightning Bolt) works—the churning effect is such a grainy black hole you feel like you’re inside it. Happened? is certainly the thickest, densest-sounding indie rock I’ve heard since Sleater-Kinney’s The Woods (or for that matter, molasses-y Woods tour openers Dead Meadow). Or maybe Queens of the Stone Age. But counter to what their name suggests, Monotonix are anything but “robot-rock.” Showoff-y, jammy, highlighting sludgy chops over craft, it’s a wonder they’re any good at all. But there’s no more eloquent way of putting it: The band succeeds at fulfilling and overturning clichés so well you may even hold out for a drum solo. Their best hook (from “My Needs”) screams “ohhhh noooo / ohhh yeaaaaah,” their funkiest chugga-chugga jam an early Soundgarden pastiche called “Set Me Free.” Great, wildly exaggerated reconstitutions of the over-fetishized ’70s, all the songs feel the same even though they run the gamut from six-minute Black Sabbath to two-minute Dead Boys.

The problem, if any, is their debt to the power-trio format that renders the parts somewhat inconsequential to the sum. That is, their tightness is messy and jarring but doesn’t actually leave room for much personality to spill out. But the songs are memorable, thankfully, and they know (for now) to leave relentlessness alone: Eight tracks in half an hour of this stuff should be all you need.

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]

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