HEALTH - 'Get Color' (City Slang) Released 07/09/09

When HEALTH’s eponymous debut album emerged in 2007 it caused quite a stir, much of which was centred on their perceived fusion of dance music’s dynamics with punk and noise influenced instrumentation and song structures. To revisit it now is to find this connection less immediately obvious than was originally made out. Yes, it shows a band obsessed with the properties of sound rather than its overt melodic content - but the murky recording and Jake Duzsik’s androgynous, wordless vocals are closer to contemporaries Liars and No Age than to the impressive cast of dance producers who reworked the album for its companion HEALTH//DISCO. Rather, it is an intense focus on textural detail that HEALTH share with many electronic artists, placing them firmly alongside fellow magpies Gang Gang Dance and Fuck Buttons.

On their second album HEALTH further explore this fascination with what can be achieved by building up dense layers of patterned sound. Where the debut was stark and achromatic, a set of surrealist studies sketched in dusty, sandblasted tones, Get Colour’s hues fit its title. Its shimmering heat sparkles gracefully, even as parched guitars turn on a sixpence to awkward and jarring as quickly as they ripple back to soothing. Opening salvo ‘In Heat’ announces itself as the most immediate thing they’ve ever put to tape as it sprints from the start line, all squalling bursts of noise and fragile, crackling guitar melody.

The next eight songs barely leave time for respite between pummelling percussive airstrikes. ‘Die Slow’ burns with rhythmic energy and a barely contained violent intent, its insistent pulse unlikely to be heard on all but the most misanthropic of dancefloors. In ‘Death+’ they briefly capture something of Tri Repetae-era Autechre in a delicate, pivoting synth motif but subvert any futuristic intent with primal, schizophrenic scream therapy. The churning feedback of ‘Before Tigers’ reaches close to the eye of the storm before ‘Severin’ explodes like a Lucozade bottle filled with nitro glycerine. Four to the floor tribal drumming propels it starry-eyed into the stratosphere, yet Duszik’s peculiarly gentle pleadings lend a grounding humanity; it’s quite possibly the finest song they’ve ever written.

One of the major criticisms levelled at the first record was that it failed to capture the sheer intensity of the band’s live shows – a fair accusation, but certainly not one that could be directed at Get Colour. The turbid production is gone, to be replaced with searing, razor-edged precision: the comforting moments are all the softer, and those points where the hinges are thrown away entirely are all the more terrifying. With Get Colour HEALTH have further carved out their own unique niche – the songs here are more ambitious and more accomplished than anything that came before. The results are nothing short of awe-inspiring.