They are androids, living on a metallic Sahara deep in space. They have African tribe routines programmed into their heads, as such they hunt ephemeral game, sit around non-existent fires and have warped chrome spirit visions. They smear the pounded roots of pylon-like trees, that aren’t real, across cheeks and foreheads, and they tell the tales of forefathers that never were in high-register robotic Gregorian chants. Or rather, they are four guys residing in LA who make avant-garde noise rock that also incorporates metallic sounding tribalism (an awful inept term, but I cannot think of a more accurate one). Health are born of the same scene that No Age popped out of, a scene who’s heart is in downtown LA’s The Smell. Apparently the coolest new place for bands to come from with The Smell regulars Abe Vigoda, Silver Daggers and The Mae Shi recently getting some exposure, probably due to No Age’s success. But that isn’t to say Health are coat-tail riding chancers, they are an exciting band in themselves as this self-titled debut shows.

With the opening track ‘Heaven’ we get a feel for what these guys are about, gloriously big and bouncy drums, a jittery bass with some sort of bifurcated effect and those electronic sighing vocals. It’s like some wild disjointed party with those androids, swirling, thrashing and tripping. ‘Triceratops’ is excellent, a mixture of disco rhythm (tittering hi-hats and a big bass drum), sheets of electronically produced noise and vocals switching between the android’s Gregorian chant and black metal screeches. While those songs, and others like them which make up most of the album, are excellent, the highlights come near the end. ‘Glitter Pills’ uses a weirdly treated steel drum sound for a bit at the start, then sets into a down-beat house music groove with wood block off-beats. There are little aural eddies that appear and disappear, a cool short riff from some sort of electronics and a padded drum sound. You get a wonderful feeling of being on some sort of drugs, the song seems to be pushed away at a distance, as if we are inside the person on drugs and are experiencing things through a haze. Then the electric riff appears again at the end with piercing loudness. ‘Perfect Skin’ is a bludgeoning Nadja-like track, big drums and a harsh guitar play a lurching rhythm, that goes: hit-silence--hit-silence--. A lone android vocal in the background links the instrumental blasts, and each time the behemoth’s foot lands the drummer plays a different part of his kit and the guitarist plays a different note or chord, and we realise that the foot-falls are getting closer together as the song progresses. We realise the song is coming together, it’s forming from isolated parts into a whole, like a Transformer. So it is running and blasting and bludgeoning and the guitar plays some reverb-y fast-strummed notes, a la a furious Explosions In The Sky part, and the track finishes all of a sudden.

So yes, this is an exciting release, but there are one or two things that mitigate it. Many of the songs sit stranded on their own, they feel more like sketched ideas partially formed, there isn’t enough cohesion between tracks. Yet sometimes there is too much similarity in sound between songs, like the band need to somehow join tracks up with each other to make bigger and longer songs. I suppose these are minor niggles as Health have definitely struck upon something interesting here. When people want a short description of this album it would be quite easy to say “The 77 Boadrums project mixed with Animal Collective’s Here Comes The Indian, played by robots, oh also, Gregorian chanting”. Recommended if you are in need of some noisy robot tribalism, I know I am. 85%

Links Health [myspace] [official site]