Health

Review: Here are some theories about Oxford Art Factory with regard Health's set. Theory number one: there is a critical audience mass required to make the room sound good. The evidence for this comes from previous sold-out gigs where the mix was exemplary (crisp, clear, well-balanced) compared with this decently-full-but-not-rammed show where the mix was all over the shop.

Theory number two: Health are just difficult to mix, which seems equally likely since they're incredibly loud, all of their sounds are processed to hell (guitars do not, as a rule, sound like running a laser across sheet metal) and that much of the night involved at least one person screaming while two played drums. That being said, the magic of the band live, as on record, is when all that noise congeals into an actual song, as on 'Die Slow' – although minimal moments like 'In Violet' worked well too. However, the fact that the band were insanely lively (especially John Famiglietti, who danced more often than he struck an instrument) didn't quite make up for the set barely cracking an hour, even with an encore.

One note on support act Royal Headache: there are a lot of reasons why they were the wrong choice for the night, not least that the band have a Jam/early Stone Roses thing going on that sat badly with Health's noisecore-meets-shoegaze sound, but also because their lead singer is clearly under the impression that he's in a hardcore band rather than a British-influenced guitar pop combo. Thus there was a lot of incongruous stage prowling, shadow boxing and the baseless assumption that the audience would be interested in knowing that "I feel like fucking shit tonight". That he wasn't feeling his best might explain why he couldn't hit a correct note for the first half of the set, although the vocals did noticeably improve once he decided to jump into the crowd, suggesting that the problem was in the foldback rather than the vocalist. When all the elements came together, as on the closing ‘Eloise’, Royal Headache were competently derivative; the rest of the time they were nowhere near that good. Andrew P Street