live @ 930 Club, 10.5.2000
The kids were too tired to get a good mosh pit going by the time Fenix TX took the stage at the 930 Club Thursday night---Lefty, Good Charlotte and Newfound Glory had already played a set of speedy punk each--- but that was okay. The members of the Houston quartet seem interested in moving beyond their teenage slam dancing roots anyway.
Singer and guitarist Will Fenix spouted the usual punk rock exhortations to the crowd to mix it up, but the sound of his band has evolved from the thin, skate-punk style found on its’ self-titled debut recording. Constant touring, on the Van’s Warped Tour and a high-profile jaunt with Blink 182 and Bad Religion this Spring, have bulked up the band’s sound. Songs like “Speechless”, “G.B.O.H.” and their infamous cover of Duran Duran’s “Ordinary World” rode two-guitar muscle and had more in common with the dark sound of the Deftones than that of Fenix TX spiritual kin like MXPX. The show betrayed more steps toward a new Fenix maturity when they did things like pay attention to tuning their guitars and tried to figure out how to play The Clash’s “Guns of Brixton”. Still, ringing declarations like “Flight 601” and “Minimum Wage” were effective because they were driven by teenage angst .
Fenix TX could very well take their punk roots into unsavory directions---at times Thursday they sounded like they had been listening to too much 311---but their were flashes, like the galvanizing “All My Fault”, when it seemed possible that the combination of the quartets’ newfound muscle and familiar suburban anxiety might indeed lead them onto bigger and better things.
Washington Post, October 2000
