Los Angeles noise rockers Health return to a changed music scene
In the six years since Health's last formal album, music's avant-garde has discovered the virtues of top 40 pop and hip hop
On a bright, hot weekend morning in July, Jupiter Keyes of the Los Angeles noise rock band Health walked onto a black-curtained set at Mack Sennett Studios in the trendy district of Silver Lake in Los Angeles. Health were filming a video for Stonefist, a throbbing electronic-driven track that had just debuted on BBC's influential Radio 1.
Keyes slid into a haze of blue fog. He was shirtless, wearing a dark blazer and thick gold-link necklace. Co-director Andrew Barchilon shouted stage directions - "A little more lip bite … try a smile and a snarl now."
Keyes' face came into focus, and he was absolutely hideous.
The band's make-up intentionally mimicked cut-rate plastic surgery. Keyes had a distended, goatish chin. Singer Jacob Duzsik's lips were inflated and covered in chemical-peel goo. Bassist John Famiglietti had a new nose and septum, and looked like an underfed zoo tiger. Drummer Benjamin Jared Miller seemed normal, except that halfway through the video he's replaced by a doppelganger, an oiled-up bodybuilder with biceps the size and colour of hams.
Right when the band's new album, Death Magic, could vault it past the Los Angeles underground and onto big new stages, it's mocking the idea of changing to be more popular. It's a grim, funny visual and poses big questions for a rising act.
In the six years since Health's last formal album, music's avant-garde has discovered the virtues of top 40 pop and hip hop (see the roster of such brutalist producers as Arca on Kanye West's Yeezus). EDM festivals, fuelled by harsh bass and strobe-lighted spectacle, prove that there is no "too much" for young, pleasure-seeking fans. Death Magic draws from all those shifts, and it could make the band much bigger while redefining pop music's cutting edge.