Health: Get Color

L.A.’s Health takes a pair of tweezers to noise music rather than a buzzsaw, meticulously crafting distinctive sounds with guitars and weird pedals, creating plenty of bleak dynamics and pop accessibility in between. Get Color doesn’t lash out at any new fans Health might’ve picked up since 2007’s self-titled album, nor does it pander to them. This nine-track, 33-minute ration feels more like a re-affirmation of where Health was headed in the first place. Get Color often does a better job than Health of capturing the void of malice that always lurks beneath the band’s surface appeal. BJ Miller might be the only drummer out there who dares summon Gang Of Four with one beastly arm and Lars Ulrich with the other, and his blasts are often more unsettling than his bandmates’ cunning streaks of feedback and abstraction. Get Color is at its best when all its contradictory impulses collide: “Severin” and “We Are Water” pit turbo-nailguns of blast-beats and feedback against swooping guitar hooks and vocal melodies that pulse with a creepy kind of gentleness. Parts of some songs, such as “Death+” and “In Violet,” sound like great ideas just lingering at some beautiful, isolated halfway point. Get Color is a hell of a tease, proving that Health is still an extraordinary band, but not always treating listeners to the full package.