The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
Every Tuesday, the Sounding Board is a space for a short-ish review of a recent-ish release and conversations about new-to-you music. I’ll get things started with a write-up about a newer, likely under-heard album, and invite you to share your music musings in the comments.
HEALTH’s new album, Conflict DLC,1 sounds a lot like my high school’s weight room. If you attended secondary school in the United States at some point after the mid-’90s, there’s a good chance it will trigger a similar association for you, too.
The veteran Los Angeles noise rockers and CapsLock aficionados, HEALTH, have tapped into a wide array of genres and subgenres to make an album that will feel familiar to anyone who has listened to heavier, louder strains of rock music over the past couple of decades. Conflict DLC features loud, chugging, pleasantly abrasive sounds that could fairly be compared to several purveyors of aggrieved tunes. In its 12 tracks, I hear Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, KMFDM, White Zombie, Deftones, Orgy, Placebo and Rammstein, to name a few prominent sonic comparators of similar emotional disposition and wildly disparate critical consensus.
It’s the sort of music that, at the right volume, can send a vibration through a 45-pound weight and add 20 pounds to a single-rep max. It’s not all beefy riffs, squamous electronic noise and gloomy lyrics, but it is mostly those things. The album’s title, Conflict DLC, is a nod to how the LP’s sound is a continuation of HEALTH’s 2023 album, Rat Wars,2 but it also serves as an acknowledgment of the band’s history of contributing music to video games.3 Plus, nearly every track on the album would make perfect sense as a pause menu song for a particularly grisly first-person shooter.4
Whether that’s high praise or a dire warning is going to depend entirely on the listener’s relationship with the darkly industrial era of alternative rock that presaged the performative negativity and over-the-top aggression of nu metal.5 If Trent Reznor’s Quake soundtrack gets your dopamine flowing, then there’s joy to be had in songs like “Shred Envy,” which would seem to have enough loud guitar to fend off the titular condition, and “Vibe Cop,” which features Lamb of God guitarist Willie Adler and electronic wobble that’s at least caught a couple of games in dubstep’s ballpark.6
If that sort of music does nothing for you, Conflict DLC is unlikely to change your mind, although some of the LP’s 39-minute-12-second runtime goes toward more delicate, or at least thoughtful, fare. “Antidote” showcases the lighter, slighter side of HEALTH’s sound. “You Died” describes mortality in blunt terms that arrive at more or less the same conclusion as William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” in far fewer words. It’s impossible to deny the beauty and brilliance in structure and sentiment that Bryant struck with:
"Yet not to thine eternal resting-place Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down With patriarchs of the infant world—with kings, The powerful of the earth—the wise, the good, Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past, All in one mighty sepulchre. The hills Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun,—the vales Stretching in pensive quietness between;" However, the economy of HEALTH's lyrics is equally undeniable: "You're dead, I'll be like you/ You'll be like me, I'll be dead too." Whether that brevity equates to the soul of wit is surely subjective, but the haunted harpsichord noises that accompany the words and lend "You Died" an appropriate funerary feel are an appreciated and well-thought-through touch.
About the writer
Ben Hohenstatt
Ben Hohenstatt is an Alaska-based dog owner who moonlights as a music writer and photographer.
For more information, consult your local library or with parental permission visit his website.
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The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
The Kids In The Hall, Season Four, Episode Fifteen
“Listen, do you have a twin sister who could watch us have sex?”
“My name isn’t Dad, you seem to have the wrong number.”
“Oh, that’s my son.”
“Do you want me to get rid of him?”
“The old bastard hung up on me!”
“No – smack then Tracy’”
“What do you mean you fixed it?! It was hanging off like this!”
“It took rollerblading for me to realize I was doing nothing.”
“How old are you?”
“Eighteenish.”
The sausages sketch is the second-most Lynchian this series has ever gotten.
Dial M For Murder – A pretty good stage adaptation with one brilliant sequence that arrives too early as the peak of the film. (Scissors impaling a man’s back must have been especially shocking for 1954 audiences.) People on Letterboxd liked the Columbo-style structure of the mystery, but even for me, a guy who doesn’t need plots to be completely airtight, it strained credulity that a mystery writer who has been boinking a man’s wife would assume that of course – of course! – the husband with motive and opportunity wouldn’t be a suspect in her attempted murder. Still fun and features a great monologue from Ray Milland as he steadily reveals his sociopathy to one unwitting former college chum.
The Lowdown – Meanwhile, I didn’t grasp all of the plot here, and it didn’t matter: the cumulative emotional effect was strong, especially MacLachlan’s face as he processes what actually happened to his brother. The penultimate episode was written by the great Walter Mosley and crosscuts car chases, murder, gunfire, and a hell of a cliffhanger while interrogating the damage “a white man who cares” can do. (And the damage from those who truly don’t.) Some quibbles but I’d love a second season.
The Great – More thoughts tomorrow! Catherine is a good protagonist because like all idealists, she expects so much from other people and they will inevitably disappoint her.
This is Spinal Tap – On what is most likely my fifth or sixth watching, the jokes aren’t LOL funny anymore, since i can recite a lot of this, but with the humor taken as a given, there is room to appreciate the performances, the incredible skill required to ad lib everything, and the surprising kindness of the film. For all that this is making fun of the music world and of pompous aging heavy metal bands, it really is not mean to our merry band and when McKean calls Guest on the stage at the end, it’s kind of sweet. Until the drummer explodes. RIP Rob. Thank you for going to 11.
Frasier, “A Day in May” – Three vignettes: Frasier sort of helping Lana with a house sale; Niles and Daphne at the dog park; and Martin attending the parole hearing of the man who shot him. Which is not even a little funny. What is THAT doing here? Except, as I noted, the eighth season seems to be ending in a very new place, the writers still doing comedy (if not as well) but maybe thinking it’s time to change the balance as things keep going. Three seasons left, and some great episodes along the way, some good new characters, but maybe eight would have been enough?
Lurker – a psychological thriller about an upcoming pop singer and the shifting dynamics within his entourage after a new member is invited to join the “team”. The new guy, Matthew, is tasked with being the “documentarian” (he has a lo-fi video camera) which gets him close to the singer quickly, but then he’s reluctant to give up that special connection when the singer’s attention shifts to other projects and members of the crew. This has a bit of a similar vibe to Nightcrawler, Théodore Pellerin gives a great performance as the new guy who is willing to go way further than he probably should to keep hold of something. I kinda felt like a few scenes were suffering from “first-time director syndrome”, ambition outstripping ability a little, but the way the film twists / curdles into its final act is so well handled that it made me wonder if I just hadn’t fully understood what was going on until that point. Either way, it’s nicely unsettling and the musical sequences are handled well (the songs are good enough to back the guy up as a believable “next big thing”), plus there are some strong performances from some young actors I was happy to recognise from other things (Havana Rose Liu from Bottoms, Sunny Suljic from mid90s etc). An interesting one, not quite the full package maybe but a strong debut.
What did we listen to?
With Blank Check entering a stretch of things that don’t interest me, I am trying a podcast co-hosted by recent guest Dana Schwartz called “Hoax!” She and a comedy writer named Liz Logan examine famous hoaxes, and started with the Cottingley Fairies. This was fun and I like low energy podcasts that involve friends chatting, though if you want serious history, this isn’t it. I will try to catch up and see if it continues to engage me. (OTOH, Blank Check without high energy Griffin might get dull.)
Musical time: Death Becomes Her the Musical works, not surprisingly, by leaning into the gags and the nasty energy of the premise, though too many songs on the recording end on an orchestral blowout move. The lyrics are laugh out loud funny (Italian opera singers singing the phrase “Space Jam 3”, “Uh, Helen, you’re acting a little insane” “I don’t like that word, Ernest”) and there’s an unexpected nod to “Vogue” near the end that absolutely bops, I wish it was longer than a minute and a half.
Oh, and this is probably why Radcliffe won a Tony, the definition of Sondheim’s “actor who can sing”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FZ0CeEIYu4&pp=ygUUZnJhbmtsaW4gc2hlcGFyZCBpbmM%3D
Still taking a break from the 1001 thing to explore 2025 albums, still finding a lot of Pretty Good stuff that isn’t entirely winning me over. Did really enjoy the Juana Molina album this morning though, excellent low-key synthpop that reminded me of Jane Weaver and the Icelandic band Múm. I keep checking new “best of the year” lists and I am completely baffled by the continued presence of Geese. I do not care for Geese.
I like Geese the band! I do not care for geese as animals, they are jerks.
Year of the Month update!
Here’s the movies, albums, books, TV, and games from 1985 for you to write about next January.
TBD: Ruck Cohlchez: Tim and/or Fables of the Reconstruction
Jan. 2nd: Gillian Nelson: Return to Oz
Jan. 5th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Rambo: First Blood Part II
Jan. 9th: Gillian Nelson: Advice on Lice
Jan. 16th: Gillian Nelson: The Wuzzles/The Gummi Bears
Jan. 19th: Tristan J. Nankervis: The Breakfast Club
Jan. 23rd: Gillian Nelson: The Golden Girls
And there’s still time to write about anything from 1948, like these movies, albums, and books.
Dec. 20th: Lauren James: The Lottery