The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

A wide stance is key to surviving a Monotonix show. Keep your feet shoulder-width apart and your arms ready to brace the incessant shock waves of bodies crashing into you. Never lose focus of the strange looking man with a bad perm and pervy mustache. He is not a cast-off from a Starsky and Hutch fan club. He is the singer—a moving target who neglects social graces, like keeping his sweat to himself. The most important rule is to put as much distance as possible between you and the danger zone.

The problem is the danger zone comes to you.

The Israeli trio sets up on the bar floor, giving them full access for intra-audience thrashing. The rig looks worse for wear. The drum kit seems one cymbal crash away from shattering. The guitar looks as if one piece of duct tape was removed the whole thing would break into splinters. The singer appears diabolically insane, and the whole lot looks like they found their clothes in the back alley dumpster. Nevertheless, the perpetually touring band is aching to leave its love bruises on the Twin Cities. And bruise they will with Monotonix' one-two punch of low-brow histrionics.

At a Monotonix show, the slippery threads of controlled chaos constantly threaten to blow loose. The guts of rock and roll kitsch foam up at the first pounding of the kick drum. In the first 30 seconds of Monotonix's set at the Uptown Bar, singer Ami Shalev breaks the first rule of getting a good review: stealing the music journalist's beer and pouring it on the heads of adjacent audience members.

For a half hour they play with disaster and consistently ram into, and on top of, the crowd. With his grossed out and glistening ape-man chest fully exposed, Shalev plants himself on top of the bar and hikes his sweat pants up to his nipples, screaming some nonsense into the microphone no one can decipher. His usual act is to stuff gasoline soaked hankies down his trousers and flame up like a human pyrotechnic. Due to repercussions of the unfortunate 2003 Rhode Island club fire, Shalev has been asked to stub out any fiery intentions for Minneapolis. Tonight he gets his death-taunting kicks by sticking his head into the path of ceiling fan blades. He leaps away unscathed, proving his shamanistic powers of invincibility.

Sounding like a mash up of Black Sabbath, Dio, and a slew of third-rate punk bands, the music is an after thought. Chord progressions are hazy at best. And forget about heartfelt lyrics. They're just meaningless guttural intonations. The three could have had equally mesmerizing careers as magicians or fire-spewing carnival freaks. To them, it's all about the performance. They ride on shock value. That's the genius of their scheme. It takes wise men to get paid to make fools of themselves.