Additional Details

Additional details

Been Together Since: 2003

Sounds Like: Musically adventurous punk rock. Like: Minutemen, Mission of Burma, Meat Puppets.

Members

Daniel Mee -- drums, vocals
Trey Lavigne -- bass, vocals
Stuart Smith -- guitar, vocals

MP3S

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Heat Party

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Circle of Quality

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Wrath of Shawn

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Heart Tell Its Attack

Audio Interview

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Track #1

Discography

Jonx 2: The Wrath of Shawn EP, 2004
The Return of the Death of the Legacy..., 2005
No Turn Jonx Red, 2006

Where To Buy

• CDBaby.com

Review

The Jonx opens No Turn Jonx Red, its second full-length album, with a minute of ragged guitar noise that sounds like a band revving its engine. Think of it as a warning: This may not always be pretty, but it will be compelling.

When the screeching stops, the band launches into Parachute, a rock song with the closest thing to pop hooks you'll hear from an avant-garde punk band. This sets the tone for an album that juggles punk, pop, math rock, noise, screams, and political and cultural statements.

Standouts include Island, with its slow build-up and quick poetry ("We want to say it's wrong to kill / The words we have no longer will"); Cashews, bassist Trey Lavigne's weird self-portrait that starts with basic facts and swells to something more surreal; and Building Tomorrow's Slums Today, a driving, spoken-word squall decrying urban sprawl.

The fact the Jonx - which includes Lavigne, Daniel Mee on drums and Stu Smith on guitar - is able to do this without a hint of pretension is admirable. The band doesn't rely on arty vagueness, nor boring noodling; this is solid rock with brevity and punch. Even discordant moments are engaging in these hands.

The band has grown tremendously since its early EPs. The songs on No Turn Jonx Red are cohesive, and the lyrics are purposeful. The tighter playing is showcased especially well on The Scent of Earth, the 12-minute instrumental that ends the album. Add the band's powerful, spare live show, and the whole package points to one of Houston's most-inventive hard-rock bands.

This is a complicated collection to be sure, but there's nothing so difficult about the Jonx's music that should keep the band playing to just the smart kids on the Houston music scene. It's time for everyone else to take notice.

-- Sara Cress | January 25, 2007

"Some guy from Chicago said we sound like an indie-rock Primus," says Daniel Mee, drummer for punk band the Jonx.

"I just listened to the new Les Claypool record today,"
bassist Trey Lavigne says. "It's fun. It's got Buckethead, Bernie Worrell and Brain."

"Who's Buckethead?" Mee asks.

"Who's Buckethead!" a wounded Lavigne replies.

"The guy who plays with a bucket on his head," guitarist Stuart Smith says.

"He's, like, the greatest guitarist ever," Lavigne says.

And so it goes with the Jonx. Even people who consider themselves in the know about music could get lost in the Jonx's extensive knowledge of rock and punk. Smith, a designer at an architecture firm, is a former DJ at Rice University's KTRU FM (91.7). Mee, a research technician in the ecology lab at Rice, spins at the radio station on Thursday night's Mutant Hardcore Flower Hour program. And Lavigne works at Cactus Records. So they are all well-versed in things you may never have heard of.

"We may know more about bands, but that doesn't mean we know more about music," Mee says. "And the bands that are touchstones for generations of rock fans are bands that we love: Zeppelin, Nirvana, the Police."

Smith, 30, took up guitar in junior high, stopped and then revisited it in college. After graduation, he began a four-year stint with the Free Radicals, a mainstay of the Houston funk/jazz scene.

Mee, 24, began his musical career in his high school's marching band, then bought a drum set when he was 16. He played in a handful of bands in college but says this is the first serious one.

Lavigne, 28, comes from a musical family that encouraged him to take up the saxophone at age 8.

"At some point I decided it wasn't punk-rock enough. Little did I know how punk-rock it would be to play saxophone now,"
Lavigne says. He took up the bass in his midteens.

The Jonx, which means "stuff" or "thingy" to former member Viki Keener, came together in January 2003 through its members' collective admiration for avant-garde punk (Minutemen, Trenchmouth, No Means No and Captain Beefheart) and the insular nature of Houston's indie rock/punk scene.

"The `scene' is made up of our friends who also play music,"
Smith says. "It's tight, and we all play at the same five or six places," which include the Proletariat, Rudyard's and the Axiom.

With influences that range from the esoteric to the well-known, the Jonx play something Smith calls "advanced punk rock."

"Punk is usually simple and straightforward," Smith says. "But we try to come up with stuff that sounds new or fresh, which makes the music more complicated than traditional punk. We play different, overlapping rhythms that complement each other. That's punk: everyone doing their own thing that then coalesces into something larger."

This device is used on Circle of Quality, a song from the band's 2004 EP Jonx 2: The Wrath of Shawn, which is already out of print. The song features a handful of drumming patterns and the occasional discordant moment. Yet the song gels with a scream-sung chorus and repetitive melodic conceits. The band manages to create tension and release every few seconds of the song's three minutes, which can either drive you crazy or keep you wanting more.

-- Sara Cress | September 9, 2004