The Jonx closed the night and reminded me just how wonderful a trio they are. The trio plays music like a drunken mathematician raving about a favorite theorem. Yet, for all its mathrock qualities, the Jonx music is never cold - it drips with feeling. Stuart Smith’s guitar is as capable of crunching out dissonance as it is capable of throwing out a lovely melody, Trey Levigne’s bass work is always aggressive and muscular, while Danny Mee’s drumming is ever nimble and powerful. Together they interact in the same manner as one of those Japanese animae robots where various robots combine their powers into one super-robot. Appropriately, all before them were crushed into submission. I’m so glad that Danny Mee’s move to Austin didn’t mean the end of the Jonx.

Houston Calling 

Space City Rock 

[cross-posted from snogfever.com]

It’s been awhile since I rapped at ya, but there’s a good reason for that, namely, the Jonx haven’t been playing any shows. In fact we’ve only played about 20 minutes of original music live since November, although we did do a set at the Hootenanny show back in January. We played as Nomeansno. It was awesome.

“What’s a Hootenanny?”

“It wasn’t THAT awesome, was it?”

Anyway, we’ve been hard at work on songs for our third full-length album. As yet the album is untitled, although we’ve already rejected “Passion of the Jonx,” “the Unbearable Lightness of the Jonx,” “God Emperor of the Jonx,” “Sex and the City (and the Jonx),” and numerous other titles that didn’t live up to our exacting standards of obliqueness and difficulty of recall. If you have any suggestions let us know. We’re currently under the working title “Out Before the Sharks and Sailors CD.”

Anyway, we have eight or nine new songs written, and we expect to play at least a few of them at. . .

The show! That we’re playing with Golden Axe and AWAKE, Saturday, May 10 at the Mink!

Golden Axe is guitarist Warren Hatfield of local metal outfits Coffin Grinder and Torches of Fury and national dude-rock heroes Valient Thorr, together with drummer James Love, who played guitar in Act of God and Dillinger Escape Plan. If you haven’t seen Golden Axe before, you owe it to yourself to make it to this show, because
A. These guys are jaw-dropping musicians
B. Their songs are fist-pumping shredders of the highest caliber
C. Warren is going back out on tour with Valient Thorr starting in June, so this is your last chance to see them for six months
Their myspace page is here. Mark the date in your daytimer or your PDA or write it on your hand or something before you check them out though, because afterwards you’ll be busy trying to glue your face back on and you might forget.

Opening up the show is AWAKE, or as certain music writers might put it, “Trey from the Jonx’s band.” Trey does play bass in AWAKE, but the boss is Doug Spearman, a multitalented local artist with credits in film, drama and visual art, who only recently got up on stage as a musician for the first time. You would not believe it if you saw this band. They play taut, raw, slow, LOUD metal-influenced rock, something like Jesu. There are few other bands like them, and none in Houston. Their myspace page is here, but honestly the stuff on there is not at all like what they do live. See this band, I promise you won’t regret it.

OK, to recap: The Jonx, Golden Axe, and AWAKE. At the Mink, 3718 Main St. at Alabama. Saturday, May 10, 10 PM. $5.

Keep it steady,
Danny

At some point I’ll try to post a picture here, although I don’t have a camera so don’t hold your breath.

I bought this cymbal at Houston Percussion Center back when it was on the North Loop just east of Yale during my sophomore year in college. I was playing drums for a (surprisingly entertaining) production of “Guys and Dolls” at Rice and I wanted a cymbal that could be used as either a crash or a ride, as the score included a lot of swing, which by the way I completely sucked at playing, so much so that I find it difficult to believe even now that the musical director later asked me to play drums in his band Gross National Product.

Anyhoo, this cymbal did not fulfill that function terribly well, as it is too light to serve as a ride in almost all cases, but it was a fantastic, if serendipitous, choice for rock: light enough to sound good quiet and thin enough to speak quickly, but big enough for eminent smashability. It was classically crisp and, at least by my standards, spectacularly loud.

Sheets of bronze only a few millimeters thick, cymbals are literally pounded into shape, and are designed to be struck forcefully with hardwood sticks. Every time a cymbal is played, the impact changes its sound imperceptibly, and cymbals age more quickly and more dramatically than any other musical instrument. For those reasons, although any individual instrument is idiosyncratic to some degree, a cymbal, I think, is among the most singular.

Tragically, the same factors that make cymbals unique also make them quite fragile. And unlike almost any other type of musical instrument, once they break, cymbals cannot be repaired, period. The second a crack develops, even an invisibly small one, a cymbal’s decay begins to shorten and its volume diminish. By the time a visible crack appears on a cymbal’s edge, its sound is a shadow of what it once was. The paradox of a cymbal is that the very process that creates its unique sonic signature is also capable of destroying it. I’ve never cracked a decent-quality cymbal that I bought brand new before, but any rock drummer worth his salt will tell you that’s a rare thing to be able to say after ten years on the instrument. In a very real sense, cymbals are made to be broken.

This cymbal has been with me for longer than any other piece of my current drumset. I’ve played it for an average of probably two hours a day, four days a week, for the past eight years. During that time it’s been on every recording I’ve made, with the exceptions of the Jana Hunter and Inoculist records I played on last year, and a few scattered live recordings. Drummers, unlike guitarists, almost never name their instruments- it would be like naming a a whole family that’s constantly adopting and disowning members- but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a personal relationship with them. I’m going to miss you, 18-inch A Zildjian Medium Thin Crash. You’ve been good to me, and I know I’ll never find another one quite like you.