“It’s completely fucked.”
If someone was to make a list of “Worst Things a Sound Engineer Could Say to a Band,” that sentence would probably be near the top. Yet, that was the reality of last night’s show at Rock and Roll Hotel. Roughly five songs into their set, Los Angeles-based noisemakers HEALTH were informed that the subwoofers had been blown. This news was compounded by another Sad Sound Engineer phrase: “There’s nothing we can do.”
This is the kind of news that could be potentially show-ending for any band, but it was a particularly bad situation for HEALTH. Yes, their newest album, Death Magic, puts far more emphasis on the dance-y electronic melodies that they played with on 2009’s Get Color and makes a definite point of bringing Jake Duszik’s pretty vocals to the forefront. However, what really makes HEALTH a must-see band and an exciting listen is their commitment to brutality. HEALTH’s roots are just as firmly entrenched in punk and noise music; they opened up their set with “Zoothorns,” proving that they still have that loud dynamic. Benjamin Miller is already an exciting drummer without Duszik and multi-instrumentalist John Famiglietti adding to his cacophony, but those two picked up sticks in between screaming into vocoders and creating low eye-widening screeches. Losing the speakers cabinets that amplify both the shockingly nasty and the fist-pumping plodding beats is no small deal.
Duszik, in particular, was visibly frustrated with this news, but at this point, they’d very much won over the Rock and Roll Hotel crowd. Instead of saving crowd favorites like Get Color standouts “Die Slow” and “Death+” for the encore, they had stacked them at the beginning before introducing the newer and more melodic material. As such, the people in the front who could hear this conversation in the monitor egged the band to continue. Duszik shrugged and said, “You guys are all fucking here. We’re gonna play and sound shitty.”
The poor mix didn’t seem to bother the people in the front rows. Admittedly, they could still hear everything in the stage monitors and if anything, the mosh pit grew more dynamic and wild. HEALTH even garnered a sing-a-long when they played Death Magic single “Stonefist.” But ultimately the show succeeded because the band didn’t give the crowd any less energy, crappy circumstances notwithstanding. Duszik checked in with the crowd repeatedly, both apologizing and thanking us for “sticking around for this improvisational punk rock set” and they even turned in a brief encore. It may not have been the set HEALTH wanted to give D.C., but their determination to give us what they could did not go unappreciated.
