Vinyl LP, Cassette, Compact Disc (CD)
For the better part of two decades, HEALTH have injected new life into their chosen suite of styles. With each release, the L.A. outfit has delved further into their unique blend of industrial, noise, metal, goth, dance music, no-wave, and post-punk, simultaneously growing more experimental and refined over the course of five albums, two collaborative albums, three remix sets, and several forays into video game soundtracks. HEALTH’s fifth full-length, Rat Wars, showcases both the band’s pulse-pounding brand of aggression and its ever-developing penchant for ambience. This time around, however, HEALTH have introduced an element of self-disclosure, bolstering their sinister craft with a personal edge that had been mostly absent in the past.
The music on Rat Wars, much like their previous work, resounds with what might best be described as a sense of gloomy, apocalyptic dread that nevertheless glows with a kind of neon pixelated brilliance. The first minute of opening track “Demigods,” for example, consists of shimmering guitar bathed in a haze of synth vapor before a massive riff and drumbeat come crashing down into the foreground. From one moment to the next, the sense of space grows from, say, a theatrically-lit soundstage to a panoramic view of a glacier, with the band evoking faint traces of Ennio Morricone and John Carpenter before shifting into a gnashing, coldly mechanical forward tread reminiscent of groups like Fear Factory, Static-X, and Prong. When guitarist/vocalist Jake Duzsik’s voice drifts into view, he sounds delicate and even frail by comparison.
These are by-now familiar devices from a band that showed a masterful ability to create a sense of mood right from the first few seconds of its self-titled 2007 debut. Since that time, Duzsik, bassist John Famiglietti, and drummer Benjamin Miller have shown time and again that brute force isn’t the only tool at their disposal. Still, it takes a certain kind of finesse to be able to intertwine angelic melodies with a sample of Godflesh frontman Justin Broadrick’s howling bark, as the band does on “Sicko.” Throughout Rat Wars, the band explicitly references other such acts in both style and tone: Broken/Downward Spiral-era Nine Inch Nails (“Crack Metal”) and The Mind Is A Terrible Thing-era Ministry (“Of All Else”), with nods to South of Heaven-era Slayer (“Children of Sorrow”) and a host of others. With Rat Wars, however, the band never quite dwells on the same idea for very long, which makes for a disorienting experience, not unlike being rushed from room to room in a museum or perhaps a rough cut of a film that abruptly changes scenes.
After multiple listens, however, the jagged flow of the music begins to sound more and more deliberate, and a coherence emerges from the chaos. Throughout, Duzsik wears his feelings of naked disillusion on his sleeve. On “Hateful,” he asks, “Who among us would die tonight / hateful and all alone?” On “Crack Metal,” Duzsik warns ominously that “You can’t save me.” He continues: “You don’t have to try/ It won’t help/ You don’t have to stay here/ You can let me die.” Rat Wars is littered with sentiments like these, with Duzsik by turns sounding confused, stung, exhausted, or resigned. This more introspective approach simultaneously offsets and augments the ferocity that’s been a long-established mainstay of HEALTH’s music. Together with recent releases by contemporaries like Odonis Odonis, Vowws, and Code Orange, the multifaceted Rat Wars suggests that genres like industrial and goth have entered a renaissance phase. More than anything, though, the album shows that HEALTH’s music just keeps getting more creatively fertile over time.
