Prior to their first tour of Australia and New Zealand, LA-based noise-rock band, HEALTH , issued a statement to their southernmost fans via YouTube.

To a soundtrack of didgeridoo pulses, the motley quartet, armed with samurai sword, baseball bat and machete, set about destroying airborne bananas, dead fish and unwitting tree branches amid one-armed push-ups and commando rolls through neglected vege patches. The more pointed targets of Crocodile Dundee and LOTR paraphernalia drove home their pre-emptive warning that, “HEALTH IS NOT AFRAID OF YOU.” But for anyone familiar with their fitful, nihilistic spasms of industrial shrieks, relentless percussion, and cold, detached vocals, it pretty much goes without saying that this lot are not easily spooked, no matter how many redbacks we threaten to pelt at them.

Their profile initially bolstered by 2007’s split EP with ‘Where Are They Now?’ poster children Crystal Castles, HEALTH’s ascent to notoriety beyond underground avant-rock/music nerd circles saw their sophomore album tour stretch out here.

Where else in Sydney could they play but at the OAF, the only venue for those obscure innovator cum indie buzz-band types, to showcase the famed performance skills that left their Melbourne audience speechless and smitten just days earlier.

The main room was predictably packed, the requisite tightly crammed throng of dance floor enthusiasts complementing the stoic shadow-dwelling chin-strokers, as the boys opened with Triceratops, one of the biggest tracks from their 2007 self-titled debut. Volume levels set to “pain for art,” HEALTH rained down its menacing onslaught, punctuating the thrashing jolts of clamouring guitar crashes and percussion booms with sterile bouts of tinnitus-laced silence.

Where the band reveal their prodigious craftsmanship is with the tight reign they keep on their seemingly chaotic kaleidoscope of sound. Like a stiff-armed waxy-moustached conductor, they’ll thrust open the door to their noisy apocalypse and just as soon slam it shut for a momentary respite, before letting the light inch back through with twitchy reverberating guitar screeches that build once again to their all-out head-fuck assault.

Bassist, John Famiglietti, provides the visual entertainment throughout with his unbridled, violent sways and epic hair flails while Jupiter Keyes shifts from manic to glassy-eyed as he alternates floor tom for Crimewave and guitar for tracks like Get Color’s Death +. With its opening loop of quirky robotic chatter and insidious insect whirrs, the baseball cap-clad (and Dexter doppelganger) front man, Jake Duzsik’s, gorgeously restrained vocals provide the perfect foil for the former’s harsh tones. A relatively gentle moment (by HEALTH’s standards), that carried through to the phenomenal lead single, Die Slow.

Their most club-friendly track to date, Die Slow is the sum of incoherent vocals playing off highly distorted basslines and cleverly melodic guitars. Dramatic angel of death-like moans brought -We Are Water_ in with thunderous drum beats and sterile guitar bleats, an overzealous crowd-surfer and occasional pants-dropper drawing a rare crack from the band, “Every time he gets on stage and pulls his pants down, I have close my eyes so I don’t laugh.”

Bringing the main part of their show to an end with brilliant Get Color closer, In Violet, the band reconstructs the sound of gentle guitar jabs poking holes through a blanket of empty silence, Duzsik’s despondent sighs contributing some eye-lowering depth.

The whole thing was over in what seemed like a brutal, breathless moment, the encore doing little to draw things out as the astonishingly brief, sparse and terrifying Courtship – a track made blog-famous in 2007 when remixed by then-partners in cacophony, Crystal Castles – barely clocked 60 seconds with a rare moment on vocals (read: primal, soul-piercing screams) for Famiglietti.

Sure, watching a show twice as long would have been amazing, but to do so would risk having our brains turned inside out and trampled on by a couple of wayward apocalyptic horses, and I’m just not sure any of us are ready for that.