Bands that make me want to move to LA: HEALTH

"We gave the guy a cd to get a show and he scored it to his own homemade gay porn."
"It was like hipster soft-core gay porn so it was totally lame."
"It wasn't what we wanted to see, which was like, the action"
-HEALTH

I have been wanting to write about this band ever since their amazing industrial-noise track "Die Slow" leaked a couple months back. Now that the album Get Color has dropped, it seems like a good time to check out this band.

HEALTH emerged from the incredibly fertile scene centered around the L.A. DIY venue called The Smell, which has played home to acts like No Age, The Mae Shi, and Mika Miko. For more on that scene check this piece in Guardian). They have been around since 2005 and have toured with some pretty huge bands like NIN, Crystal Castles, and Of Montreal. So it seems like they have paid their dues, sleeping on couches and quitting their jobs to tour full time.

Get Color is not for everyone. Huge drums (tom-sorta like Fuck Buttons), screeching guitars, long, sometimes atonal lyrics at the back. But, like a lot of noisier music, the highpoints are visceral and transcendent. I think this band is serious about making art, which is one of the highest compliments I can give.

They will be playing at the Bowery Ballroom in New York on Sep. 24.
Tickets

Old-ish interview from Pitchfork

MP3 HEALTH Die Slow
Mp3 HEALTH Nice Girls-Daisy O'dell Remix (cool-but definitely more Daisy's aesthetic than HEALTH's)
NEW Video for Die Slow (Awesome)

Just buy it: Everything Goes Wrong

Hate all you want. This band was already great and they got better on their sophmore effort. I feel like this post is redundant in some way. What else was I going to say about a band that is so obviously good right now?

mp3 Vivian Girls Tension

buy Everything Goes Wrong (Insound)

Jay-Z The Blueprint 3

I remember going to the mall in Providence, RI one November during high school. We went into a Tower (sniff sniff) and I walked out with a copy of The Black Album. We drove back to my cousin Paul's house and popped the disc into his little Sony boombox in the basement. We listened, amazed. It seems like ancient history: a time before Kanye exploded and became a bloated supernova, a time before the autotuner (and it's death), a time when Em could stop everything with a verse.

New Jay ain't like that. The Blueprint 3 has decent tracks, but lacks the drive and imagination of The Blueprint, Reasonable Doubt, The Black Album, etc.

Buy it?

mp3 Jay-Z Empire State of Mind

Labor Day- Romain Gavras videos

BusyBusy weekend up here. Luckily labor day in NYC is pretty quiet as far as shows go. I did miss the Smith Westerns' 2 dates.

This weekend Pitchfork posted their top 50 videos of the decade. An impossible list to curate, but their effort was valiant. Not on the list was my favorite video of the decade...

This one did not get hyped as much as Romain Gavras' other big video for "Stress" by Justice, which is also incredible. Rocky meets Dardenne brothers. Enjoy.

DJ MEHDI - SIGNATUNE

mp3 DJ Mehdi-Signatune (Thomas Bangalter Edit)

Avett Brothers- Slight Figure of Speech

Wanted to give a quick shout out to NC group the Avett Brothers, especially Joseph Kwan. They are releasing the first single from their upcoming album I and Love and You. The 7" is called "Slight Figure of Speech." Order it on insound.

Get out and see the most violent, electric bluegrass show of your life at Terminal 5 in NYC on October 17!

mp3 The Avett Brothers I and Love and You

Washed Out- Life of Leisure

I'm going to stick with the Ducktails theme in a couple of ways. The first is by being late on an artist that has been building a buzz on another excellent release: Life of Leisure by Washed Out aka Ernest Green. The second is through a shared aesthetic interest in wandering, abstract, tunes. This seems contradictory; dance and garage rock have rarely been considered complementary genres. However, as Nite Jewel's excellent, Good Morning has already proven, no genre is immune to the warm analog glow of this no-fi trend.

It also seems strange that a dance pop album induces such inertia. You will not run up out of your beach chair and start twisting when this record comes on. No, you will sink in. Your head may start to bob, but you won't notice. Your eyes will glaze. You will wake up 3 minutes later with that strange smile still on your face.

Life of Leisure is available via Mexican Summer

mp3 removed due to copyright restrictions

Ducktails - Wishes

A little tardy on this track, as I am on most releases. Matthew Mondanile of Real Estate released Landscapes, an unpolished (that's a good thing) gem a couple weeks ago on Olde English Spelling Bee. They had the LP at Other when I was in the city this weekend, but I didn't pick it up. Dumb.

The track that I was referring to earlier is "Wishes." It's so good that when I play it on my ipod, I usually just have to shut the thing down after I hear it; I can't find anything I want to listen to afterward. A couple of layered guitars wander, while Mondanile's wistful lyrics hang at the very back of the mix. Highest recommendation.

mp3 Ducktails Wishes

Interview (hits home) from Vice.