LIVE REVIEW: HEALTH, GosT, Zetra, Electric Brixton, London, 20/10/2024
Twelve years ago, this reviewer was playing Max Payne 3 on his bang average laptop, having to adjust settings to get it running at anything above slideshow framerates. Whilst enjoying the chaos and endless activations of bullet time (a series staple), the soundtrack was slowly burrowing its way into my heart. This climaxed with a moment at the end of the game where a massive shootout was soundtracked by this urgent, haunting and unsettling song called TEARS by someone or something called HEALTH. When we realised they were both a band and did the whole soundtrack, they went straight on the radar and have never left. The band have slowly but surely grown themselves to a point where they can sell thousands of tickets a night.
Zetra appear onto the stage with a sweeping, spacey swagger, and gently submerge the crowd in their weighty yet ethereal sound. If you aren’t familiar, the band are a duo that look like they are going to drop the most hilariously savage black metal, recorded on a potato for authenticity of course, but who actually sound like the lovechild of The Cocteau Twins and Type O Negative after they’ve been listening to a lot of my bloody valentine and The Cure. Having just released their first album (a very, very good one too) the band have honed their live performance and confidence as an outfit on stage very well. This reviewer has had the pleasure of seeing them grow in confidence and assurance with each time they’ve seen them, and some early sound gremlins aside, this was an assured opening set. Suffer Eternally and Gaia sound particularly pleasing to the audience tonight. Their star will continue to rise. 7/10
GosT comes on to deliver the answer to the question “what if the nightclub scene from Blade, but with occasional death growls?” Now playing with a live bassist, the skull masked and leather clad electronics wizard gave us a short, sharp shock of a set, sounding absolutely massive inside the venue. Making use of minimal, clever lighting, the show amped up the crowd, and probably would have had the whole venue throwing impossible shapes if they had had a longer set time. Lots and lots of fun, as always 8/10
HEALTH emerge onto the South London stage shrouded in a cold and horrible darkness. The crowd was increasingly excited for the Cum Metal overlords, and the amount of those T-shirts on display, coupled with their Sad Music For Horny People shirt does make for quite the surreal contrast with the actual sound of HEALTH’s music. A desolate, icy bleakness mixed with the punch and wallop of the angriest parts of Nine Inch Nails isn’t the obvious choice to embrace online meme culture, but the 21st century has and will continue to do things to us all. Perhaps this is part of the Neo-Industrial Conflict in the 3rd millennium the tour poster promised us.
Opening with IDENTITY from Disco4: Part 2 (an album full of collaborations with interesting artists), the trio immediately slap the audience with a beautifully harsh wall of noise, vocals with that eerie vocal effect Jake Duzsik always brings. The stage production is very strobe heavy, and entirely backlit. A driving, ominous choice of an opener, the band immediately gets the audience moving. Following that with a much more immediate song like GOD BOTHERER from 2019’s Volume 4: Slaves of Fear brings the first mosh-pit of the night as a cosplayer dressed as Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker throws down with some furries.
Songs like STONEFIST may seem like ancient history compared to where than band is now, but that pounding intro remains undeniably awesome blasting out of a PA system at your face. When the band start hitting the material from RAT WARS, the crowd noticeably picks itself up a level, DEMIGODS building to its climax to the joy of the giddy mass at the front of the stage. Tracks like this really highlight the great drumming from B.J. Miller.
They even find time to dip into the multiple video games they have written music for, including TEARS from the Max Payne 3 soundtrack, a song that still sounds so sinister all these years later, as well as MAJOR CRIMES from the Cyberpunk 2077 soundtrack.
The band’s recent cover of Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away) by Deftones has already taken up a spot on the setlist that would seem quite hard to shift. Ending the set on a one-two punch of FEEL NOTHING and the best song Rammstein never wrote, DSM-V absolutely brings the house down, the bounce of the verse getting the cosplayers and the Cum Metal clad masses jumping and headbanging like they didn’t have work the next day. The moment the show ends, bassist and electronics kingpin Johnny Famigiletti (aka Johnny HEALTH) hops off the stage and is treated like a conquering hero by the audience. He said he’d be out shortly, and he lived up to that and then some.
Judging by the reaction from the Joker cosplayer and multiple cat ear wearing fans in the mosh-pit, tonight showed a band nearly in their third decade only just beginning to peak. Bigger things are surely on the horizon for the Los Angeles trio. One could say their career is in rude….aaaahhhh we don’t even need to say the punchline! 9/10
Written by: Louis Tsangarides
