Celebrate While We Incinerate

Malevitus has never sounded weirder or more beautiful.

- Cree Mccree

Tiana Hux is a force of nature, a long-stemmed rose studded with thorns that draw blood. A gifted performance artist, she frequently sheds skins and has appeared in many different guises, in both her home state of Texas and her spiritual home of New Orleans, where she released her first record, Story, just before Katrina, and put down permanent roots in 2016.

As a properly starchy Mary Poppins, Hux delights kids at birthday parties. As the booty-shaking MC Sweet Tea, she leads her Tastee Hotz dancers in feminist rabble-rousers like “Why Don’t Saint Sensations Get Paid?” In “A Day Late and a Dollar Shot,” an immersive Hux production staged at the New Quorum in 2019, she was a bourbon-swilling Storyville denizen who knows how to play all the angles. And when she steps up to the mic with Malevitus, she’s a high priestess of rock and roll who calls down our collective demons in an ecstatic exorcism.

“Read my lips: ‘Apocalypse.’” Hux cuts right to the chase on “Golden Toy Soldiers,” the opening track on Malevitus, the band’s stunning debut CD, which foreshadows all the landmines ahead: climate change, societal breakdown, families torn apart by war, death and incarceration. It also throws down the musical gauntlet: hard-driving rock laced with rap, psychedelia and snotty punk ’tude, that crackles with enough kinetic energy to make us dance through the apocalypse on our own graves.