Music

HEALTH: "People need to be told what's cool"

by Anne T. Donahue

After years of playing second fiddle to the east, the UK, Ontario and even Quebec, California has finally come back into the spotlight as 2010 becomes defined by bands who call the west coast home.  However, though an abundance of talent is emerging from the Golden State, LA’s HEALTH has been on the radar for some time, releasing original material in addition to two remix albums (DISCO and DISCO2 – the latter being out this week), and announcing plans for a fashion line at some point in the future.

However, while they acknowledge the community-feel of the LA music scene, HEALTH has always stood apart.  And while it’s only now that the west coast is beginning to earn its overdue accolades, when AUX spoke to bassist John Famiglietti prior to their NXNE appearance, he maintained that California has been a Mecca of talent for some time – it just wasn’t “in” to acknowledge it.

“Especially in the beginning of the 2000s, there was really a stigma – especially with indie people, like ‘LA is not cool, anything from there must be bad,’” he explained.  “So a genius like Ariel Pink was criminally overlooked.  He got bad reviews, no one was following his stuff and now it’s something like, ‘oh, you know that genius, Ariel Pink that we were all really into, blah, blah, blah’.  So it’s nice to get some respect finally.”

“But why?” he continued.  “I think they just didn’t know any better.  People need to be told what’s cool.”

Though regardless of the lack of love previously given to bands in the west, musicians honing their craft on the shores of California simply used their relative dismissal to form an eclectic community that HEALTH is a definite part of.

“We weren’t getting people moving there, so our scene is pretty much home grown – especially for being a really big city,” Famiglietti revealed.  “Interestingly, it’s made up of mostly locals.  Like, we didn’t get a bunch of the cream of the crop or hip people from all over the country moving here to start a band like they did in New York.  So we sort of got our own feel going.”

“We are definitely huge beneficiaries of the support structure of the LA scene,” he added.  “Without it, we wouldn’t have got our start.  But in terms of just our sound and what our band does, we can be – not outsiders, but on our own because we just sort of do our own thing.  Now we’ve kind of calmed down, but especially back then, big scenesters [were] at every show hanging out – stuff like that.”