CD reviews

Health
Get Color
(Love Pump)
*7.7*
Goes well with: Big Black, Blank Dogs, Schroeder’s Cat 

Get Color is awash in contradictions. Spastic, but melodic. Repetitious, yet startling. There are guitars and lyrics, but they’re buried under layers of reverb. The guitars on “Die Slow” sound like bending metal. The lyrics on “Before Tigers” sound like cries of pain and pleas for mercy. And “Death+” gives us a glimpse of what the world will sound like when the robots finally take over. I’m not even sure “sounds like” is the best way to describe how Health operates. “Feels like” might be more revealing. If that’s the case, then Health feels like acid.

The best experimental music opens up new soundscapes for the listener—whether you’re jamming alone with your headphones or getting crushed on the dance floor. Health does both. They make music that goes places and drags you along for the ride.

Lewd Acts looks like a hardcore band, sounds like a hardcore band and smells like a hardcore band, but Black Eye Blues is full of surprises. It might even be a revelation. Short songs are offset by longer numbers. Densley’s screaming is counterbalanced by oratory and invocations. There are even some instrumental sections that aim to be poignant and actually achieve it.

“You Don’t Need Me” is 42 seconds of punk-rock “rejected by society” boilerplate that will get your 10-year-old brother stomping around the living room. It’s followed by “I Don’t Need You,” which clocks in at close to four minutes and is considerably more complex. Putting the songs side by side suggests that one’s response to a world that rejects the values of the individual is not only meaningful, but also essential. Densley’s lyrics are absent of both irony and knuckleheadedness—a rarity in hardcore.

Black Eye Blues closes with “Nowhere to Go,” a dirge-like lamentation that builds and builds from nothing to something. Densley belts out the lyrics as if his life depends on it. It’s wracked with pain, suffused with sorrow and absolutely epic.

Lullabye Arkestra is a two-piece, husband-and-wife outfit from Montreal that serves up a sludge of bass-heavy goth-punk sprinkled with synth. Justin Taylor-Small beats the drums, Kat Taylor-Small hammers on the bass, and the couple shares vocal duties, with Kat yowling away like a wildcat in a bear trap.

The album opens with “Get Nervous,” a fuzzed-out punk-rock number that invites comparisons with Lost Sounds’ “I Get Nervous” but comes up short. If songs like “The Icy Hand that Guides Us” and “Surviving the Year of Wolves” exploit the advantages of what a two-piece can do, then “Fuck the Night” and “Fog Machine” revel in its limitations, which is another way of saying the less successful songs are repetitious and sound similar to one another. And the last song, “Sad, Sad Story,” is a bluesy lamentation that just feels all wrong for this record.

Threats / Worship is a strange album and looks out of place on Vice Records (the same company that puts out the snarky fashion-and-culture magazine). Lullabye Arkestra wavers back and forth between darkwave and goth but is best when they dispense with the theatrics and bring the noise.