Bowery Ballroom
New York City
Words by Cameron Cook
Photos of HEALTH at the Williamsburg Waterfront by Abbey Braden
One of my favorite albums of 2004 was They Were Wrong, So We Drowned by Liars, a loosely conceptual post-punk record about sacrificial witchcraft rituals. Fair enough, after the immediate trendiness of Liars’ equally brilliant debut album They Threw Us All In a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top, They Were Wrong… was pretty much universally panned in every mainstream music outlet from here to eternity. I scoffed at the time and I scoff still, because in my mind, They Were Wrong… remains one of the most important rock releases of the past ten years, and this is why: much like what Weezer’s Pinkerton propelled a legion of black-haired emo kids into the late-90’s, the experimental massive crunch of They Were Wrong… has inspired an entire generation of musicians to take to their stuttering samplers and make the darkest, dankest form of dance punk (I guess?) they can possibly conjure. And no one is doing so better than Los Angeles’ own HEALTH.
When you think of LA, home of The Hills and TMZ, HEALTH’s dirty and demented aesthetic might not be the first thing to come to mind, which is precisely what makes it all the more special. At last week’s headlining set at New York’s Bowery Ballroom in support of their brand new album Get Color (preceded by a riling set by Denver, Colorado’s Pictureplane), with all the lights turned low, HEALTH launched into what can only be described as a full reinvention of what it means to be a punk band (someone even stage dived! In 2009!). The great thing about music in this day and age is that, after literally decades of being correctly and incorrectly labeled by journalists such as myself, musicians are realizing that absolutely nothing is holding them or their creativity back. The only way to not be considered retro is to, well, invent your own shit, and hawk it to the masses with the aplomb of a seasoned salesman. Whether it be Salem mixing hip-hop, shoegaze, juke and goth, or House of LaDosha distorting the public perception of African American rap artists to an unrecognizable finish, in 2009 you no longer have to belong to anyone’s club in order to be cool, and HEALTH understand this. I could call their performance a death disco Neanderthal noise orgy (which it was), but it’s something that must be experienced firsthand in order to be fully understood.
What I will say is that Greatest American Drummer Magazine or whoever needs to give out an award to BJ Miller, because his extra-skilled drumming carries the band from being sufficiently noisy to straight up nuclear insanity. Bassist John Famiglietti’s lanky dance moves definitely incited the mosh pit as well, and when the feedback that blasted from the PA in between every song morphed into the opening of Get Color’s lead single “Die Slow”, this writer wasn’t the only one to completely lose it in a sea of sweaty bodies. “We Are Water”, another one of Get Color’s more “accessible” tracks (if you could genuinely call it that) spewed forth, again, complete pandemonium. It was all over way too early, it felt like around 30 minutes but really, when you are that mesmerized who can tell for sure?. HEALTH left us breathing hard and anticipating their next performance. Get Color shows such an evolution from HEALTH’s first album, you can’t help but be intensely curious about what they will come up with next.
