The Jonx, No Turn Jonx Red

One of the coolest things about being an observer of the local H-town scene, at least for me, is getting to watch a lot of hometown folks evolve. The band process here works the same as it does anywhere else, at least most of the time — almost nobody magically appears, fully-formed and ready to blow your doors off. Rather, the initial steps any band takes are often fumbling, uncertain ones, with the band just trying to find its collective footing. Over time, that band becomes more sure of itself, more comfortable in its skin, and more willing to take chances with its basic sound.

No Turn Jonx Red hits me like the product of a band well into that second stage of band-dom. Where some of The Jonx’s earlier stuff was a little scattered — good, definitely, but still scattered, in a charming, friendly way — with this album they’ve really hit their stride, and it shows. These three guys (bassist Trey Lavigne, guitarist Stu Smith, and drummer Danny Mee; I think everybody sings) are so unshakeably tight, so together in what they’re doing, that even the noisier, more seemingly chaotic things they do come off as perfectly natural. I swear, if I didn’t know better I’d think Lavigne, Smith, and Mee had been playing together as The Jonx for their whole freakin’ lives.

And the sound? Take that surging/swinging sound I loved back in the day when I first heard NoMeansNo, Fugazi, or, heck, Jawbox, add the screamed/yelled vocals and the combative, threatening guitars, throw in a decent helping of noiserock atmospherics and off-kilter rhythms, tack on some too-damn-smart, cynical lyrics, and you can call The Jonx one of the best bands currently working in Houston’s oft-beleaguered music scene. (Any indie labels out there listening? Put out these guys’ records. Seriously.) It’s bleak, engaging, a bit frenzied at times (“Iron Steed”), a little ambient (see “Prelude,” “Interlude,” the first part of “Escape (This Is Not A Song),” or the awesomely sludgy, Earth-esque “The Scent of Earth”), and heck, there’s even a melody peeking out here and there (“Parachute,” “Escape (This Is Not A Song)”).

There’s plenty of improv-ish stuff, but it doesn’t sound like it was improvised; rather, the whole thing sounds like the band knows exactly what it’s doing. No aimless, meandering jams, thank God, just purposefully intense rock that has a destination in mind, no doubt, evem if you can’t quite see what it is ’til you get there. Even on the longer tracks, things build so organically, getting thicker and more complex as the music moves and shifts, that the changes make perfect sense.

Given all of the above, the sarcastic lyricism of tracks like “Building Tomorrow’s Slums Today,” a dark little song about the, ah, transience of Houston’s recently-built structures that rings so damn true that I knew what it was about before the song even started, almost seems like icing on the cake.