Crack

It must have been the fact the gig took place on a chilly Monday night, because support acts Call The Doctor and Idles struggled to wake up the stagnant crowd gathered to see HEALTH at The Louisiana despite their impressively energetic performances.

But when the headlining LA noise rockers hit the stage, they managed to galvanise the audience with their primitive yet textured sound, as they executed a set of beautifully orchestrated chaos. HEALTH’s music is heavily percussive and raw with fragments of euphoric melody. The band achieves this noise with a set up of numerous drum kits, guitars and assemblage of electronic devices. The band members switch musical roles through the set, rendering each instrument with frenzied aggression, while maintaining such precise timing that you’d think there must be some kind of telepathic nexus between these guys which allows them to play like this.

In terms of HEALTH’s stage presence, the band’s most engrossing visual aspect is the lofty multi-instrumentalist John Famiglietti, who took the centre stage position and leaped around relentlessly with a low strung Rickenbaker bass, thrashing himself against the venue’s low ceiling.

The only moments when the velocity dims a little is when HEALTH play their more accessible tracks such as singles Die Slow and USA Boys, as they seemed confined inside more conventional song structures. The synth hooks of these aforementioned tracks felt a little predictable in comparison to the musical bedlam of the majority of their set.

HEALTH have gained as much recognition from their remix albums as their original compositions and they teetered on the brink of mainstream recognition back in 2007 when Crystal Castles re-worked Crimewave into a somewhat sanitised, irresistibly catchy indie-electro anthem. But if HEALTH feel obliged to get people dancing and please more sensitive ears, then they are truly misguided because the most intoxicating parts of their live show is when they tear through the noisier, more experimental elements of their music, and the crowd’s stimulated response to these moments on Monday night confirmed this.



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Words: David Reed

http://www.myspace.com/healthmusic

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