Monotonix makes the White Stripes sound like Duke Ellington. The rock trio from Tel Aviv consists only of a guitarist, a drummer, and a vocalist, but its ruckus is monolithic — and scarcely confined to the stage.

Frontman Ami Shalev likes to take it to the people, so audiences usually find him belting feverishly emotional anthems right in their faces. The band performs in the middle of whatever venue it’s playing, much as it did last week in the small basement music space at Union Hall in Brooklyn. Mr. Shalev, 43, a slender if muscular man who rarely keeps his shirt on and has a bushy tangle of hair and a broad, curling moustache, bears an uncanny resemblance to either the magician Doug Henning or the 1970s porn star Harry Reems.

His performance partakes in a bit of both: One moment, Mr. Shalev is bellowing out lyrics from the stage, the next he’s vanished into the crowd, only to rematerialize above it, using the venue’s overhead water pipes like monkey bars. Then he leaps back into the thick crowd, rubbing his bare, sweaty, hirsute chest against a fan. At one point during its show at Union Hall, the band spontaneously hustled all its equipment across the room and plopped it down in front of the bar, transforming the back of the room into the front of the room.

“You know, it’s just because in the show you can be something that we can’t actually be in real life,” Mr. Shalev said, chatting recently during Monotonix’s fifth American tour, which will make a stop at Cake Shop, in Manhattan, on Sunday. “I don’t know if we try to keep it crazy, but we try to keep it interesting; everything that happens is improvisation.”

There’s nothing about the hardcore fuzz and primal rhythms of Monotonix’s new album, “Body Language” (Drag City), that sounds especially Israeli. Instead, the music fits into a continuum of stripped-down, amped-up Midwestern hard rock that is rooted in 1960s bands like MC5 and the Stooges. Mr. Shalev, in particular, evokes the raw animalism of Iggy Pop or David Yow, lead singer of the 1990s art-punk band the Jesus Lizard. “I think it makes me feel more natural about things,” Mr. Shalev said of his bare-chested style. “It can get very dirty. It feels better, and sometimes during the show I spill beer on myself, and sometimes people pour beer on me.”

The guitarist, Yonatan Gat, replaces the bottom string on his Fender Mustang with a bass guitar string, and runs the signal through a bass amp adjusted for maximum reverb. This creates a dense, heavy sound that feels much bigger than a mere guitar and drums.

“We are different from the other bands in Israel,” Mr. Shalev said. “But in the United States, we are only different because we come from Israel.” The problem back home is that the band only has about five or six clubs it can play in the entire country, so touring abroad is the only way Monotonix can exist.

Fortunately, the band has found an ally in David Berman, the singer-songwriter who records as the Silver Jews. He described the band’s survival instinct as genetic.

“They just tore my head off,” he said. Mr. Berman met the trio during a tour of Israel in 2006, and discovered there was much more going on beneath the noise. Both Mr. Gat’s and Mr. Shalev’s fathers were childhood refugees from Poland during World War II. Mr. Gat’s father decided to jump off a train that he suspected was bound for a concentration camp. “Yonatan thinks that in that moment, as his father decided to stay or jump, his existence was born. And Ami’s father was given his 5- and 6-year-old siblings when he was 9 years old, and walked them from Poland to Palestine — in the middle of the war. So when I look at Monotonix, I think about the Jews and the will to survive.”

Mr. Berman helped get the band signed to his label, the Chicago-based Drag City, which in turn led to the current tour with another unusual act, Dark Meat — a 17-piece ensemble from Georgia (the state, not the nation) that plays unreconstructed 1960s freak rock. It makes for a rather heady, and hairy, chemistry. But Mr. Berman insisted that it’s no novelty.

“There’s something very destined about Monotonix,” he said. “It’s good they are touring here. No one ever gets to see Israelis in any other context besides the news.”

And for Mr. Shalev, it’s too late to stop now. “For the future,” he said, “I believe that destiny can take us anyplace.”

Monotonix will perform Sunday at Cake Shop (152 Ludlow St., between Stanton and Rivington streets, 212-253-0060).