Words – @ladylane____
Photos – @photo.amai
HEALTH’s Australian return brought Perturbator and King Yosef to the FORUM and the three acts seemed less like a conventional support package than three different answers to the same question: how much atmosphere can you build out of noise, rhythm and distortion?
The night began with KING YOSEF, whose set was less an introduction than an immediate assault on the senses. There was very little ceremony to it. The sound came at you in great, ugly slabs of distorted electronics, industrial percussion and something almost feral underneath the beautiful surroundings. Pure filthy bliss.
KING YOSEF’s sound sits somewhere between industrial hardcore, noise, electronic music and the sort of bass-heavy physicality that you don’t so much hear as feel. On paper, that might sound like an intimidating combination. In practice, it made for one of the most immediate sets of the night. “Cut The Chord”, “Power” and “Spire of Fear” surged into us like a drill to the ear drums, completely occupying each vacant space with brute force and undeniable ferocity.
For only thirty minutes, KING YOSEF treated that limitation like an advantage. There was no unnecessary build-up and no sense that he was waiting for the audience to catch up. He had the audience heaving in perfect unison. If KING YOSEF had spent his opening set dragging the audience towards the edge of something unpleasant, PERTURBATOR arrived to make the edge danceable.
James Kent’s live incarnation of PERTURBATOR is remarkably economical. There isn’t an enormous band occupying the stage. There doesn’t need to be. The combination of synths, guitar and live drums produces a sound vastly larger than the number of people creating it, and the Forum suddenly felt less like a 2,000-capacity theatre and more like a European club at an ungodly hour. What made the set work was its momentum.
PERTURBATOR doesn’t really give you a place to stand and admire the machinery from a safe distance. The rhythms are too insistent. Even when the music sounds cold and mechanical, there is something deeply physical underneath it. The live drums give the electronics a human pulse, while the synths stretch everything into something much bigger and stranger.
“Humans Are Such Easy Prey” was particularly effective in that regard. The song has always possessed that feeling of being chased through some enormous neon-lit city, and that atmosphere became tangible. The lighting, the bass and the relentless rhythmic drive created a kind of controlled panic.
The set didn’t need a dozen songs to make its point. Forty-five minutes was enough to establish the world, throw the audience into it and then disappear before the spell had time to wear thin.
Thankfully I wore my dancing shoes because the momentum for HEALTH was a tangible hum. Then came the opening of “A Cruel Angel’s Thesis” a strange, almost mischievous choice before the first proper song of the set and suddenly the anticipation in the room broke into something else entirely.
HEALTH opened with “Vibe Cop”, followed immediately by “Trash Decade” and ‘Hateful”. It was an aggressive beginning, but what became apparent very quickly was that this wasn’t aggression for aggression’s sake. HEALTH understands the value of contrast. They know that a beautiful melody sounds different when you’ve just been hit with a wall of industrial noise and they exploit that beautifully.
“Shred Envy” pushed the intensity higher before “Feel Nothing” shifted the emotional temperature. The cold crushing noise was brilliantly contrasted to the sea of sweating bodies, jumping, singing, dancing, drinking
HEALTH’s music has always existed in the uncomfortable space between brutality and vulnerability. The electronics can be punishing, the drums enormous, the guitars abrasive and then Jake Duzsik’s voice comes through it all with this remarkably controlled, almost weightless quality. That contrast is the secret weapon.
There are moments where the band sound like they’re trying to shake the building apart, followed by moments where the vocals seem to hover above the wreckage.
“Ashamed” and “Major Crimes” brought that tension into sharper focus, before “Tears” slowed the emotional machinery just enough to let the audience breathe and then came “We Are Water”. It’s one of those songs that demonstrates why HEALTH have managed to build such an unusually devoted following. It isn’t simply heavy. It isn’t simply electronic. It isn’t simply melodic. It contains all of those things simultaneously, and live they become enormous.
The FORUM was particularly well suited to this kind of performance. Its ornate architecture creates an almost bizarre contrast with HEALTH’s sound. The venue is beautiful in an old, theatrical way; the music is often ugly, anxious and deliberately abrasive. That contradiction made the whole performance feel slightly unreal.
“You Died” and “Demigods” then pushed the set into its final stretch, followed by “Future of Hell” and “Ordinary Loss”. By this point the distinction between audience and performer seemed increasingly irrelevant. The crowd wasn’t simply reacting to individual songs anymore. It was moving as one thing surging, shouting, dancing, headbanging and occasionally just standing completely still to take in the sheer scale of what was happening. Then came “Don’t Kill Yourself.”
It’s difficult to imagine a more HEALTH title, and yet the song didn’t feel like a bleak conclusion. In the context of the set, it felt almost cathartic and then, finally, “DSM-V”.
The closer was the perfect place to leave the audience: not with a neat resolution, but with one final eruption. HEALTH don’t really do tidy endings. They leave you somewhere between exhilaration and exhaustion, with your ears ringing and your nervous system wondering what exactly you’ve just subjected it to.
That’s what HEALTH do particularly well. They take feelings that are difficult to articulate anxiety, isolation, anger, numbness, grief, desire and make them expansive. Goodnight from me and my dysregulated nervous system!
Special thanks to HEALTH, Perturbator, King Yosef, The Forum, DESTROY ALL LINES, and DALLAS DOES PR.
