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reviewed for FasterLouder

HEALTH are yet another band to step up to the plate from the semi-legendary Smell venue in Los Angeles. Their first album got the bloggers and the indie underground excited with the way they took the DIY electronic sounds and added some choreographed aggression and a hazy sheen. They straddled multiple camps of indie, electronic, experimental and industrial and the hype that built up around them sees high anticipation and expectation for their new album Get Color.

First single Die Slow set a pretty high bar with its lumbering bass and see saw digital riffage. It showed they could keep things heavy on the dance-floor without becoming noise. Unfortunately nothing else on Get Color quite reaches the level of brilliance that Die Slow achieves but there are moments where they do get close.

Nice Girls melds Jesus And Mary Chain distortion with tribal thunder drumming and their trademark blissed out vocals. It is their most guitar-centric moment and feels like a heavy-lidded, dark trip, all warm and hazy like when you stand dead still in a club with torrents of sound cascading around you.

The vocals across the album are the human link between the machines and the listener. In saying that they aren’t quite human, not fully faceted at least. They tend to toward indistinguishable phrases and held notes that add to the hypnotic and drone feel. Vocally they have taken the shoegaze aesthetic and married it with a churning and pounding mix of energy and noise.

Heavy industrial harshness takes the spotlight on tracks like Severin with its metal crashes and organised fractured dissonance. In fact the whole record sounds a little too constructed, it definitely isn’t free wheeling and improvised in any form. That dance/electronic influence is what grounds them as slaves to beat and structure.

Making a short album at only 33 minutes was a wise move as the relentless rigidity of the sounds do wear hard on the ears. Any longer and you’d be reaching for the stop button. The final track In Violet is also the longest on the record but it succeeds by inducing a gloriously repeating staccato pattern over some sharp synth beds. It treads the fine line between abrasion and meditation in the way some of the harsher tracks from the last Portishead album did. That is where HEALTH’s success lies when they do get it right.

Coming from a city like Los Angeles it is easy to see how HEALTH’s take on My Bloody Valentine, noise and no-wave post punk skronk has developed the way it has. In other cities they may have ended up sounding darker and more distant, morose and corrupted. In the city of angels they can’t avoid the sun-baked punk energy that so many acts from LA seem to possess.

HEALTH are digital dance punks embracing communal music and even though these American Apparel poster kids try to push the abrasive edge with song titles like Eat Flesh, Death+ and Die Slow the real mantra behind all of the static and noise appears on a sticker that accompanies the CD – ‘You Will Love Each Other’. Indie music fans who embrace experimentation, chaos and noise will no doubt be happy participants in HEALTH’s cyber-sonic love-in.

Get Color is out now on Popfrenzy…