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Product Description
Review
The title’s an entirely apt one: HEALTH truly Get Color. They understand the appeal of contrast, how an imbalance between X and Y can actually produce the most beautiful Z. Their music is alive with dissonance, but equally enthralled by elegance and experimentation; it is vivid, striking, absolutely brilliant to dance to but just as likely to send a newcomer running, screaming, to the safety of Snow Patrol.
This is the Los Angeles-based four-piece’s second album; their first, a self-titled affair which earned a sizeable spread of positive reviews upon its official UK release in 2008 (and more stateside), was characterised by mix-dominating percussion, electronic pulses and screeches smattered across a collection of skull-rattling beat-scapes. It attracted enough attention to send the band to Europe and beyond, and they’ve enjoyed tours and shows with acts of similar blog appeal, including No Age and, recently, Deerhunter.
Get Color is quite clearly a step towards wider (although never mainstream) acceptance – lead single Die Slow is a pulverising piece of electro chirrups and low-end rumbles, but the dreamy vocals and silken synth sounds are absolutely tuned to beat-freaks with as much, if not more, love for bass-heavy floor-fillers as basement-headlining indie bands. Penultimate offering We Are Water is a flashback of sorts to the band’s interim-period remix album, which took the cacophony of HEALTH’s debut and mixed it with techno shades – the track is sure to have even the least-focused listener twitching with approval. At its climax, though, it shifts form to mimic the avant-metal of fellow townsfolk Isis: a surprising but pleasing twist.
For all its apparent compositional concessions, though, Get Color still features a wealth of boundary-testing noise: Death+ stutters and spits its fractured beats, the sonic death throes of a laptop behemoth; Severin echoes the demolition ball bombast of the band’s debut; and Eat Flesh plays out like the soundtrack to a Lynch-ian future-world vision full of cyborg clones indulging in sordid sex games.
Through operating largely at the wild frontiers of rock and dance, HEALTH are an always challenging outfit, and Get Color is as close as they’ve yet come to capturing the sounds inside their heads without actually slicing their own skulls open. There’s always next time, mind. --Mike Diver
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Should Be On Prescription (9/10),
By
This review is from: Get Color (Audio CD)
HEALTH don't play their guitars, preferring to torture them. Electrical interference and guitar FX sounding like a thousand breaking windows soundtrack their skittish wailing and flailing. At regular intervals, unintelligible and spiky noise smash between bars giving credence to the much-banded `noise terrorists' tag.Alone, this would prove too much, so with it is with happy constitution that these challenging soundscapes are punctuated with true songs: joyous and deliciously dark experiments in post-punk like deconstruction all swaddled in My Bloody Valentine's most abrasive drone. Industrial-shoegaze Colossae A Place To Bury Strangers are brought to mind with the heavy FX use, elsewhere the addition of DFA 1979's anarchic bloodlust allows Get Color to reach boiling point. The breakneck, car-crash theatrics of "Die Slow" are fascinating and visceral. The terminally cool `Before Tigers' sizzles with energy and amp-wrecking feedback levels. The Crystal Castles-like way in which "Death+" manages to infuse a rhythmic funk into cacophony provide sublime moments of horror disco. Its aggressive tribal drumming gives way to bleak post-punk and Decepticon-like distortion, which comes sweetened with Jake Duzsik's ghostly vocal. Get Color's penultimate offering, "We Are Water" combines the best bits of Battles' "Atlas" and smashes them headlong into Slayer's Reign in Blood. Along with the rest of Los Angeles' Club Smell scene, HEALTH go a long way to proving that a city without a great past has a great future, for beyond the explicit beast there is an absolute beauty.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
3.7 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews) 5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Oh geez, this thing slams,
By somethingexcellent - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: GET COLOR (Audio CD)
When I heard the Health album from Health, there were tracks that cut straight to the bone and really got to me, but alongside these cuts were others that sounded a lot like a band trying to find its way. One remix album and a single later, and to my ears it sounds like the group has locked into something powerful, brutal, and beautiful all at the same time.That aforementioned album of remixes may or may not have been the major reasoning behind their slightly new direction, but "Get Color" is a real grinder, with songs that sound like they're built from pure sinew and bone and primed for dancing (or at least thrashing about at a fast rhythmic pace). The album kicks off with "In Heat," and it gets things going with a less than two-minute kick in the teeth that layers squeals of atonal synth, shimmering electronics, powerful drums and bass and light, almost ethereal male vocals. It's a perfect opener in that it sets the tone for the rest of the album, but swirls with intrigue and never feels like it completely locks in for too long. From there, the album gets even better. First single "Die Slow" is one of those cuts that should become a huge hit (but would probably only due so in an alternate reality) as a lumbering synth groan and more bludgeoning drums give way to rave-up choruses that incredibly catchy, while "Before Tigers" powers up again and again by veering back and forth between huge crests of guitar noise and sprays of digital haze. For my money, though, the best song on the entire album is the blistering "We Are Water," a four-minute burner that arrives near the end of the disc and really sounds like the group simply trying to step on the pedal a little bit more for the entirety of a song. Taking elements from all songs previous (dancey, but heavy rhythms, blasts of electronic noise and guitars and light vocals), it steps up the intensity incrementally, letting loose with a glorious blast about two-thirds of the way through that's one of my favorite moments in music for the year so far. So yeah, it's probably needless to say at this point that "Get Color" has shot up my list of favorite albums of the year so far for 2009. At 9 songs and 33 minutes in running length, it only begs for repeated listening as well. [...] 2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What it felt like to hear Surfer Rosa in 1988,
By Geoffrey Caveney - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: GET COLOR (Audio CD)
Quick question: What was the most important rock album of the '00s?Answer: For 9 years and 8 months, there wasn't one. Give Spin credit for figuring this out and not making a best of the decade list at all. They saw it coming in their '85-'05 list where no '00s rock album ranked higher than #48. In one way or another the best rock music of the decade was a development of earlier sounds, from OK Computer to Nevermind to Murmur to punk to The Beatles to Chuck Berry. Nothing from 2000 to August 2009 sounded like a new direction in rock music. Then HEALTH released Get Color with a few months to spare in the decade. This is a "noise rock" band incorporating elements of melodic pop into their noise and coming up with something startlingly original. Nirvana was famous for combining fast parts and slow parts in the same song; Get Color does the same thing for noise parts and melody parts. It's not pop melodies played loudly, and it's not a band trying to hide their pop songs behind a wall of noise. The melodies here are bright slivers of sunshine periodically breaking through the cloud cover of noise. Beyond that it's hard to describe this music, since it's so different from anything that's come before. This must have been what it felt like to hear Surfer Rosa in 1988. The stagnant post-Radiohead rock scene needs this desperately. HEALTH is already known for the dance remixes of their music, and when I listen to this album it makes me want to hear the process in reverse: HEALTH reworking other pop songs in their noise style. Every listener will have their own set of songs that come to mind for this; I'll start with The Chameleons' "In Shreds", Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Hysteric", Tears for Fears' "Shout", and the Loud Family's "Don't Respond, She Can Tell". The sound of Get Color is going to have an enormous influence on the best rock music of the next decade. Look for it on Spin's best albums of the century list in 2015 or 2020. 2 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Not so good,
By RatBoy - Published on Amazon.com
One, maybe two tracks have any value. The rest sounds like a bunch of kids making senseless racket in their mom's garage.
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