HEALTH – HEALTH DISCO 2 « New music, features, reviews, news and free mp3s

With a band boasting seven live members you by rights expect to experience something above the norm. Sadly, tonight Midlake offers nothing but the norm.

Album Review

HEALTH

Health Disco 2

[City Slang]

8/10

By now we really should expect the unexpected from LA noise quartet HEALTH. Their first remix album that turned their abrasive, semi-listenable debut into a record of techno bangers should have seen to that, and the whole commercially-fingering ‘Die Slow’ episode. The latest curveball in the band’s perpetual goal to sound like no-one else – not even themselves – is this reworking of last year’s ‘Get Color’ LP, featuring such savvy meddlers as Salem, Gold Panda and Javelin.

The brief seems to have been to produce an ambient, electronic record with an almost summery disposition, and that’s been achieved quiet brilliantly, from Small Black’s woozy reworking of ‘Severin’ to Javelin’s take on ‘In Heat’, which sounds something like Toto’s ‘Africa’. Four artists show everyone else up though, and that’s HEALTH themselves who supply the opening, original track ‘USA Boys’, which judders and snaps like Timberland and can’t help to question why this band don’t just make a dance record from scratch.

By Mandy Drake