We had a few kind words for the L.A. noise-rock quartet Health on Wednesday after the band sold out and blew away the Echoplex on the first date of a new national tour. Apparently YouTube was not as impressed, as the video-sharing service just yanked Health's new kind-of-sexy video for its single "USA Boys," which is really no randier than anything you'd see on basic cable on a school night.

As the band's Twitter feed suggests (in profane terms), its spectacularly gruesome and violent clip for "We Are Water" is apparently A-OK, but a bit of bare thigh will damage young psyches. Fortunately, Vimeo thinks its viewers aren't quite the shrinking violets that must be over there on YouTube, so click here to view the lovely "USA Boys" clip.

-- August Brown

Photo: Health at the Echoplex. Credit: Bret Hartman / For The Times

 In HEALTH’s new video for their single "USA Boys," a young couple throw a wild rumpus in a decrepit warehouse, drop a few hallucinogens, and collapse in a surprisingly forthright tangle of soft-core sex.

It’s also kind of a metaphor for the fiendishly ambitious Los Angeles quartet’s career up to this point. Their self-titled debut in 2007 imagined a very strange world where Ornette Coleman recruited a bunch of recovering thrash-metal heads to back him at the Super Bowl halftime show. The tracks were essentially dozens of jagged sonic objects clanking together.

But HEALTH performed them with painstaking skill and ferocity, and had such an unexpected asset in singer Jake Duzsik’s wispy voice (which recalled My Bloody Valentine’s Bilinda Butcher more than anything), that what might have been a notch in the Smell’s beloved realm of the barely listenable took on the heft of a future arena act.

After a dance-inclined remix record and 2009’s album "Get Color," in fact, they became one, opening for Nine Inch Nails on that band’s final round of touring. "Color" dialed down the competitive restlessness of their songs and let their drummer, the surgically punishing BJ Miller, finally play deeper rhythms. Duzsik wrote more evocative melodies, and like on the indie-hit "Die Slow," their textures turned less violent and more creepily synthetic.

It’s a golden age for “projects” in pop music. Stars are frequently ciphers for the skills of equally famous producers. Rappers as singular as Jay-Z turn over huge swaths of albums to guests. Mainstream rock acts can be just as singles-devoted as their pop and R&B counterparts.

A pop nation of unattached free agents yields tons of unexpected pleasures. But two young and rising bands in Los Angeles, Health and Entrance Band, are reaffirming the more old-fashioned virtues of being in a band in new ways. “Band”-ness is a different thing from being a guitar-drums-bass rock combo. It’s about being a cohesive unit where each member is distinct and irreplaceable, and where the interplay between them adds up to something singular and new. Entrance uses the pyrotechnic instrumental virtuosity of its three members to aspire to a stoned, Hendrix-sized wallop, while Health explodes practically every trope of punk, noise and electronica and puts the pieces together in almost gallingly ambitious ways. They don’t have much in common, except that each act evokes a bit of that old saying about the Velvet Underground -- that everyone who heard them went and started their own band.