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Album reviews Music

Health

The hallmarks of HEALTH’s sound are unmistakable: gleaming shards of sawtooth oscillation stabbing out from dark silence, synths buzzing like swarms of cicadas, the whole band resonating as if inside a gong. On their first two records, they arranged these sounds like guerrilla tacticians, continually assaulting, disarming and surprising the listener, and sounding like no other band while doing so.

On Death Magic, these moments are fleeting, and without them, HEALTH sound like a lot of other bands. The arrangements are built around powerfully foregrounded, ringtone-ready melodic refrains and singsongy I-luv-u-but-u-h8-me lyrics. The vocals, which in the past did a lot with a little and felt incantatory, androgynous and liminal, now sound uncannily like Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington, a pseudo-teenaged smirk behind the frown.

None of this is a surprise – the album seems to be the logical endpoint of a trajectory that started with 2009’s Die Slow and runs through their commissioned remix compilations and video game work. But until now, HEALTH never seemed not to surprise, and fans will surely be divided over whether this is a maturation of their sonic identity or an abandonment of it. 

Top track: Courtship II

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