HEALTH – Get Color
‘Should Be On Prescription’
HEALTH don’t play their guitars, preferring to torture them. Electrical interference and guitar FX sounding like a thousand breaking windows soundtrack their skittish wailing and flailing. At regular intervals, unintelligible and spiky noise smash between bars giving credence to the much-banded ‘noise terrorists’ tag.
Alone, this would prove too much, so with it is with happy constitution that these challenging soundscapes are punctuated with true songs: joyous and deliciously dark experiments in post-punk like deconstruction all swaddled in My Bloody Valentine’s most abrasive drone.
Industrial-shoegaze Colossae A Place To Bury Strangers are brought to mind with the heavy FX use, elsewhere the addition of DFA 1979’s anarchic bloodlust allows Get Color to reach boiling point. The breakneck, car-crash theatrics of “Die Slow” are fascinating and visceral. The terminally cool ‘Before Tigers’ sizzles with energy and amp-wrecking feedback levels.
The Crystal Castles-like way in which “Death+” manages to infuse a rhythmic funk into cacophony provide sublime moments of horror disco. Its aggressive tribal drumming gives way to bleak post-punk and Decepticon-like distortion, which comes sweetened with Jake Duzsik’s ghostly vocal. Get Color’s penultimate offering, “We Are Water” combines the best bits of Battles’ “Atlas” and smashes them headlong into Slayer’s Reign In Blood.
Along with the rest of Los Angeles’ Club Smell scene, HEALTH go a long way to proving that a city without a great past has a great future, for beyond the explicit beast there is an absolute beauty.