Loose Record :: So You Know What You're Missing

The show at Studio B this last Tuesday was basically a double bill, Crystal Castles and Health have had plenty of well deserved attention, and released a couple of 7"'s together which sold out instantly. Unlike most shows, I wanted to see both of these bands live after playing their split seven inch over and over.

Based on Health's full length on Lovepump United, I knew I was going to be in for abstract disjointed rock. Health were completely surprising from one track to the next, screaming punk distortion to minimal breaks of weird sound ambience, huge drums, deftly changing between punctuated slow tribal tom beats to a high hat dance punk sound. I was looking forward to hearing this live, and they didn’t disappoint. They aren’t necessarily in the same electro/synth punk category as Crystal Castles, being more guitar-based, and their material is obviously rooted in the creation of live insane manipulated distortion, but the focus on tweaked unheard sounds is present in both.

Health would explode into tight bursts of guitar and cymbal crashes with vocal feedback, embracing the improvisation of a live performance, picking up guitars and beating on them for sounds or twisting knobs crouched on the floor, but in rehearsed bursts. They succeeded live in using their recorded album material as a base for reinterpretation. The one long performance shifted from deliberate pauses of regrouping to complete chaos. Everyone in Health was on vocals at one point or another which became just another sound that wasn’t even recognizable as lyrics but just as another musical element, and layered with unidentifiable guitars was a conceptual performance of dark ominous walls of sound and silence.

After an excruciatingly long break between bands, Crystal Castles finally appeared along with a seizure inducing constant strobe that unmercilessly went on the entire set. At times singer Alice Glass was yelling into a microphone, but there were no vocals coming out that I could hear. She was working the stage, falling into the crowd, running around, posing, accentuating vocals with anguished collapses, but it just added to this weird limelight feel I didn’t think I was signing up for.

I was a little weary noticing right away the rave element present, the neon bracelets, swinging glow sticks, tiny bouncing backpacks. I was a little disturbed this stereotype still existed, it wasn't just hipster stripped day-glo hats and ridiculously patterned bandanna's, this was the full on rave culture from ten years ago.
As a literal show it must have met the crowds expectation of a Tuesday night dance party, but the recorded material has so much more promise.
In "Alice Practice," the blips and glitches are the best parts, the sounds are bordering on something circuit bent, definitely off for the typical dance/electronic music. This was part of it's appeal, it was smart, not just programming but messing with the analogue element as well, technically arranging the best malfunctions into something different in the over saturated easily imitated dance world of laptop DJ's. Unfortunately, everything that made it different was missing from the live show.

If nothing else, this was better than average dance music, but the innovative element was gone, it was the usual pounding beats and the typical live drums which made it even more of a standard dance affair of synth sounds and effectless vocals. They played maybe 5 songs and then left for an encore.

I didn’t stick around.

[Thanks to Diana Wong for risking extreme bodily injury to get these excellent photos. Full gallery can be seen here.]

Labels: Crystal Castles, HEALTH, Studio B