HEALTH’s nightmarish metal

Los Angeles trio HEALTH has evolved considerably across its four studio albums.

ELECTRONIC/METAL

Vol. 4: Slaves of Fear

HEALTH

Loma Vista/Caroline

4.5 stars

Vol. 4: Slaves of Fear, by HEALTH

With a distinctive sound that’s equally at home on strobe-lit dance floors and in heavy metal mosh pits, Los Angeles trio HEALTH has evolved considerably across its four studio albums. Its self-titled 2007 debut demonstrated its roots in the noise-rock scene, while more recently it has moved towards electronic production, often backed by live instrumentation. As niches go, it’s certainly a strange one, but the result is an immersive, captivating aesthetic that sounds unlike any other group.

The music of HEALTH is so dark that it could make black holes look luminous, and Vol. 4: Slaves of Fear is without doubt its most nightmarish work. That’s a compliment, by the way, for the three musicians — singer/guitarist Jake Duzsik, drummer Benjamin Miller and bassist John Famiglietti — are masters in mood and seem to take pleasure in manipulating the emotional state of their listeners. Most of the dozen tracks here run at a high tempo, with Miller’s percussion — which alternates between a drum kit and booming electronic beats — driving what often sounds like the scariest rave you’ve ever ventured into.

As a follow-up to 2015’s stunning Death Magic, this is another fine effort; Lars Stalfors produced both albums, and that partnership is clearly a good fit for both parties. Although slightly more disjointed than its predecessor, this release is no less compelling. Thrash metal influences are on show in Feel Nothing and Black Static, which both chug along to palm-muted electric guitar riffs backed by the pummelling rhythm section, while the verses of second single Strange Days (1999) pulse with controlled fury that’s offset by an expansive chorus.

This push and pull is central to its sonic footprint, and it’s the fertile ground between brutality and beauty that HEALTH expertly mines. Mid-album track NC-17 is among the best songs the group has recorded as it explores subterranean bass frequencies and glitchy electronica before resolving into a woozy chorus that sounds vaguely Middle Eastern. This is one of the few instances on the album when Duzsik’s vocals are obscured. Death Magic saw the singer finally pushing his voice high in the mix, and that trend continues here — an inspired decision, for his sweet, androgynous vocals are a vital counterpoint to the masculinity of many of these arrangements.

Final track Decimation is the outlier, as it starts as a clean acoustic guitar ballad paired with Duzsik’s clean vocal melody, followed by an anthemic rock section that brings the album to a satisfying conclusion. In effect, this five-minute suite captures the band’s considerable dynamic range in a single song.

The one downside to this music is that it can be so aurally demanding that the ears tend to become fatigued through repeated exposure. In moderation, though, HEALTH is among the strongest acts on the planet. Highly recommended.

ANDREW McMILLEN

-

Remind Me Tomorrow, by Sharon Van Etten

ALTERNATIVE

Remind Me Tomorrow

Sharon Van Etten

Jagjaguwar

4 stars

The life of a touring musician leaves little time for much else. After releasing Are We There in 2014, New York singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten decided to step off the touring treadmill to see where else life could take her. Since then, she ended a long-term relationship, went back to uni to study psychology, had a baby with her drummer and acted in Netflix series The OA. The break has done her good. On fifth album Remind Me Tomorrow, Van Etten has traded indie rock guitars for beats and synths — a choice sparked by a collection of vintage synths in the rehearsal space she shares with actor Michael Cera. Her songwriting is still as solid as ever, and the result is an album that sounds like the sonic love child of Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Nicks, offering swagger, vulnerability and a little wry humour. “No one’s easy to love / Don’t look down my dear, don’t be surprised,” she croons over fuzzed-out bass on No One’s Easy To Love, poking fun at the fiction of love as endless companionable bliss. On Seventeen, she serenades her past self and the New York City of her youth with a sad yet anthemic chorus as she and her young family prepare to leave the Big Apple for a more affordable place to live. “Downtown hot spot / Used to be on this street / I used to be seventeen / I used to be free / Or was it just a dream?”

Van Etten’s early career began with songs about heavy-duty heartbreak. Now, as a woman of 37, she’s figured out that heartbreak doesn’t mean your life is over. As she says on Memorial Day: “You will learn, or you will do it again.”

SOPHIE BENJAMIN

-

What Chaos is Imaginary, Girlpool

INDIE ROCK

What Chaos is Imaginary

Girlpool

Anti

4 stars

When Girlpool surfaced as a teenaged duo straddling barebones folk and emo, there were few hints that, just five years later, the Los Angeles band would be adding string octets and 80s-style synthetic drums to its jangly, heart-on-sleeve catharsis. But Harmony Tividad and Cleo Tucker’s third album together does that and more, pushing into a bold new future while preserving the disarming intimacy of those early recordings. A great deal of emotional terrain is covered on What Chaos is Imaginary, with singing and songwriting duties split evenly between the two. Now non-binary in terms of gender, Tucker sings an octave lower than before, deepening the distinction between the two voices. That’s Tucker we hear on ragged rock dirges such as Lucy’s and the Elliott Smith-esque Hire, as well as the sultry fever dream Minute in Your Mind and the almost alt-country Swamp and Bay. Other Tucker contributions hark back to Girlpool’s unadorned past, including the hushed All Blacked Out, with its lovely lyrical nod to the band’s former base of Philadelphia.

Tividad’s work is equally affecting, whether reinforcing the familiar base of lilting singing and fuzzy guitars or dispensing such wounded, diary-like lines as: “I’m consistently not worth your time.” Tividad breaks significant new ground too — most notably on the title track, one of just two songs to cross the four-minute mark. Against damp organ, atmospheric drum pads and the aforementioned strings, What Chaos is Imaginary proves to be an ambitious ballad unmoored from anything Girlpool has done before. Still in their early 20s, the pair already lay claim to an engaging, enviable catalogue that’s only broadening in scope.

DOUG WALLEN

-

Time After Time, by Blues Point Vocal Group

JAZZ

Time After Time

Blues Point Vocal Group

Independent

4 stars

I found this pleasant, modest album quite addictive. The melodies were swimming around in my head for days. This is the Blues Point Vocal Group’s third album in 20 years, with the others being released in 1997 and 2002. It features four excellent Sydney singers, accompanied by immaculate bassist Craig Scott. Lorraine Silk and Lauren Dawes share the soprano and alto parts, with George Washingmachine and Dan Barnett singing tenor and baritone. The latter two are best known as instrumentalists — violin and trombone, respectively — but, of course, they are both also fine jazz singers. This album is short; at 20 minutes, it’s over in a flash.

Beginning with Louis Jordan’s 1943 hit, Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t, it includes the stirring Adele pop hit, Rolling In The Deep. Four jazz standards are beautifully treated, including All The Things You Are and Moonlight In Vermont. The singers are reading charts by five different arrangers who — in an unusual choice for this kind of group — do not provide for any improvised scat singing. The late Bill Motzing’s version of Caravan is notable as it includes several two-bar improvisations from Scott, joined here by guest drummer Dave Sanders, using brushes. Later in the same piece, Scott plays a splendid 12-bar solo that considerably enlivens the music. In the case of Judy Bailey’s arrangement of Time After Time, Silk sings the first chorus solo. When the group enters for the second chorus, the rich four-part harmonies are like a burst of sunshine. At the end, Bailey provides a little harmonic flight of the imagination that adds spice to the piece. On an album that sounds somewhat conservative, these little things mean a lot.

ERIC MYERS

-

Live in London, by Mavis Staples

ROOTS/ROCK

Live in London

Mavis Staples

Anti-/Cooking Vinyl

3.5 stars

Though it might not set the Thames on fire, Live in London staples down another page in the annals of American music history for one of the surviving stellar singers of the 1950s-60s civil rights movement, when gospel and sociopolitical activism were inextricably linked. The self-produced recording, which captures Mavis Staples and a gun band in mid-2018 action at the atmospheric Union Chapel, is released as the diva counts down to her 80th birthday. Following the recent deaths of fellow musical freedom fighters — her sister and Staple Singers bandmate Yvonne Staples and her soul sister Aretha Franklin — it marks a particularly poignant time for a performer who has worked with leviathans like Prince and Bob Dylan. The spirit of Mavis’s legendary family ensemble hovers over this album, tangibly so in a punchy reworking of her father Pops Staples’ mid-60s Freedom Highway staple, What You Gonna Do,that tips a hat to 21st-century Chicago blues. Staples extracts every drop from Curtis Mayfield’s Let’s Do It Again in a flirtatious duet with back-up vocalist Donny Gerrard. Guitarist Rick Holmstrom’s incendiary electric guitar playing ignites a soulful cover of Talking Heads’ Slippery People and provides an incisive intro to George Clinton’s Can You Get to That. While Mavis’s singing shows signs of wear and tear, the septuagenarian still regularly hits emotional highs, most notably during an encore featuring the 1973 Staples Singers’ song Touch a Hand.

TONY HILLIER