There are certain things that ring true in here. HEALTH's songwriting does tend to be best at its most ambiguous, stuff like "Women and men breaking their promises" repeated four times (and that's the entire song) and "All we lose we learned from you" is way cooler and grimly mysterious than a pretty blase song about an empty relationship and literally all of Life. This would be fine if the music covered it up, but some of the riffs on SoF are pret-ty, pretty bad. (Feel Nothing is, frankly, embarrassing.)
But oversimplifying the album as nothing but shitty riffs doesn't really make sense and basically reeks of a critic not wanting to actually engage with the album. Strange Days (1999) is basically perfect industrial, and categorizing it as chugging the same note misses the arpeggio in the verses (which is deliberately missing in the prechorus to emphasize the heaviness) and basically completely misses the more experimental tracks like Black Static and particularly NC-17, which I can't heap enough praise onto.
Basically, the flaws of SoF were there on Death Magic too. The lyrics were just as bad, praising Stonefist while you criticize SoF's simplistic riffs is beyond tone deaf, and SoF really isn't that much heavier of an album than Death Magic was, not that that's automatically a bad thing. Get Color is still their best but I don't mind the new direction at all, especially if it occasionally gives us stuff like USA Boys.
Also the fact that Sasha claims that Jupiter tied the group together is pretty sad when you consider why Jupiter left, and claiming that the word "slave" is offensive because slavery only existed as something Americans did to Africans (???) is very, VERY weird.
they gave Ariana's trash-ass new album an 8, The Fragile a 2, and I Get Wet a .4 so whatever
Before this thread I had never heard of this band before and had zero idea what kind of music they make. I admittedly have very little experience with music like this so the only vibe it conjures up in my mind is NIN but with the vocal of some indie emo band frontman. Half way through it, very interesting, definitely have to be in a certain mood for it though. How is their other work?
HEALTH get compared to NIN a lot when that's not wholly accurate, I think it happens because one of their three biggest sources of exposure was touring with them once. They've basically been honing their sound in front of the global public. Their first album is noise rock to the core to the point where one song is literally just a drum solo with occasional screaming, and they've gotten more melodic over time. It took them six years to make Death Magic, but if you follow the side shit they did in between, the evolution from Get Color being guitar focused and Death Magic being mostly made on computers makes a lot of sense. Death Magic is their most accessible album, but Get Color is still their overall best. You're not gonna find a more perfect fusion of inaccessible noise rock and pop-punk than Die Slow.
