The reFRESH LA Music Series, a Fader and Coors light-sponsored party at Los Globos, was the type of party with free beer and free tacos, glossy Fader magazine giveaways, and watched by security guards in elegant suits. Plus they had a DJ set by LA-based producer P. Morris, who was blasting music making my whole body vibrate from head to toe. It was a Thursday night but it sounded like the weekend already and a large number of people had gathered there to see Health, who was about to perform a secret free show,… not so secret if you were on the Fader’s list, but still not advertised much elsewhere.
Back in July, Health had a 3-night run at the Echo, in anticipation of their new album ‘Death Magic’ released in August on Loma Vista Recordings – an indie label with acts like St. Vincent, Little Dragon, Rhye and even Marilyn Manson – but I attended none of these shows; they played at the FYF fest, but I missed their set again,… I knew nothing about them, so may be it was time to catch up?
A Health concert is a strange experience full of noise and exhaustion, the four guys looked like they were giving everything they had on stage and the sound was aggressive and anxious, building chaos in a very short amount of time with songs that could disorientate you before you had time to take a breath. There was a lot of walking on stage, a lot of drums moving around too, tons of electronics and pedals, and the fuzz and distortion were as intense as the musicians’ nervous moves and furious headbanging. The music had all these angry and aggressive beats, and so much thunder in the guitars, which were bizarrely contrasting with Jacob Duzsik‘s soft and dreamy vocals carrying the songs melodies.
On the right of the stage, Jupiter Keyes, on drums and various electronic keyboard, was wearing a shirt saying ‘cannibal corpse’ and making the most disturbing I-will-eat-everyone-alive faces… the stage was very dark with a flashing white light, and when I could see their faces, they seemed to express suffering or fear, although I never got the chance to see anything from drummer Benjamin Jared Miller and, at the extreme left, I was constantly chasing John Famiglietti’s face masked by his whipping long hair. Looking back at this frightening scene, I am barely surprised to read that ‘Grand Theft Auto’ franchise, asked them to compose the score for ‘Max Payne 3’, a shooter video game mixing violence and isolation.
I was in the front and since I go to a few punk shows, I am always prepared for an eventual crowd tsunami,… you never know, and considering the chaotic violence going on in front of me, I was wondering when this would turn into a crowd riot,… but not at all, people were not in the moshing mode at all, it was not the style of the music, they were rather dancing, actually the guy behind me was even getting too close for comfort and irritably bumped into me way too many times.
Most of their songs were at the verge of explosion before the eventual disaster was cut short, finishing into the lament of Duzsik’s vocals. Since I could not see any setlist around the stage, I am not sure what they played, very probably many songs of their new album ‘Death Magic’, like ‘Stonefist’, one of their poppiest tunes, which sounds much quieter on record, almost like an industrial track of Depeche Mode or Nine Inch Nails, but revealed itself much more ferocious in its live form. And that was the case for all the songs.
It is very hard to imagine how could anyone write this kind of songs, but it was surely experimental, bringing the unexpected at each second, and at the end, it didn’t sound like anything I had heard before, not psychedelic pop, not punk, not rock, but a bit of everything soaking by electronics and a lot of noise. I still don’t know what to do with Health’s music, it’s a complex relationship, sometimes it bogged itself down into a lot noise and lost me, sometimes it exploded into an enraged and interesting drama. Although it was not EDM, it was still linking electronics to a certain type of dance and this is probably why electronic adventurer Flying Lotus was hanging out in the back, while I was stuck in the front… Health’s music is not punk either but the fury of their live performance certainly reminds punk just like the nihilistic nature of lyrics: ‘We’re here/There’s nothing else/We’re not here to find ourselves/Follow your lust/There’s no need for forgiveness/Do what you want/Don’t hurt the ones you love’… they sang during ‘Flesh World’, ‘We fall apart/Life is strange but it’s all we’ve got’ during ‘Life’… Death awareness and despair was constantly floating above the music, but there was still some message of hope, at least we could still dance our pain away in the middle of all that noise.
