Justice - the "†" era (July 10)

[jaxxalude]

In a recent interview posted on the official website of The End club (one of the mainstays in London's dance/electronic club scene), Pedro Winter - the owner of this French duo's record label and long-time manager of Daft Punk - points to April as the month of choice for Justice's debut album.

For those who are not aware, this French duo was the one who won the Best Video award at the last MTV Europe Music Awards and prompted Kanye to his childish bad-loser antic onstage. Another selling point for this board: they remixed Britney in the past. ;)

As for their sound, they expertly mix techno and house leanings with a strong rock influence and hip-hop-styled cut 'n' mix techniques. They're also lumped in with the bulls**t New Rave scene NME has been trying to fool us all since last year. But nevermind that. When you hear them, it will be difficult for you to stand still!

More details up in here.

[jaxxalude]

Australian dance/electronic music website InTheMix has an interesting feature on them. Read on!

[jaxxalude]

British magazine Observer Music Monthly tips them for the "Class of 2007".

[jaxxalude]

Here is a feature on Justice's record label, Ed Banger, on BBC Collective. It includes full audio tracks.

[busyboy]

Exclusive: Justice Reveal Debut LP Details

French electronic duo (no, not that one... or that one) and Kanye West fan club presidents Justice will release their symbol-heavy † (that's a cross in case your browser hates on certain characters) on Vice Records/Ed Banger July 10.

† includes Pitchfork's 35th favorite track of 2006, "Waters of Nazareth", as well as "D.A.N.C.E.", released in single form this week. The long-awaited full-length debut from pious producers/remixers Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay will bring due process to the world through the summer, and, although the Justice league is currently only scheduled for a handful of live dates, you can expect that to change soon.

†:

01 Genesis
02 Let There Be Light
03 D.A.N.C.E.
04 New Jack
05 Phantom
06 Phantom pt. II
07 Valentine
08 The Party
09 DVNO
10 Stress
11 Waters of Nazareth
12 One Minute to Midnight

Justice in action:

04-27 Chicago, IL - Smart Bar
04-28 Indio, CA - Empire Polo Field (Coachella)

[Mr. Yeah]

This record is going to be great.

[jaxxalude]

Thread title changed. Less than two and a half months for all our home-speakers to go apeshit and BOOM!

[busyboy]

^ Apparently not, the album leaked!

[busyboy]

NME

Justice, †



At last, there is Justice in the world, just not on the dancefloor
Let's be clear: NME is loving Justice's work. The totemic remixes of Simian and Franz; seismic recent single 'Phantom l'; the 'Waters Of Nazareth' EP -collectively they're some of the most sonically exciting and spiritually punk rock things to have happened in dance music in years.

However, the key phrase there is "dance music", a genre with a specific primary function: making people dance, and a well-established delivery system: the 12-inch single. Why are Justice buggering about with an album?

'†' is not a bad record. Its best tracks, such as 'Phantom l' and its disco-fied coda 'Phantom II', or grave five-tonne-of-funk opener 'Genesis', bristle with the Parisians' exhilarating trademarks: fuzzy distortion, hard, tight edits, churning, elasticated bass, thunder beats, yet all sound fresh and different. Nonetheless, these hulking great grooves will always sound best in a club.

Conversely, when Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Augé reach beyond that apocalyptic sound, to bring some essential variety (and songs) to proceedings, it all goes a bit, well, bland. 'Valentine' is a trite doodle, as is 'The Party', fronted by try-hard Uffie. 'DANCE', meanwhile, is sonic Marmite. With its choir of school kids making like the Jackson 5, it'll be a genuine crossover hit. But it is also hugely irritating. Give it six weeks and you'll be launching your stereo through the window when it comes on Radio 1.

Justice? Talent to spare, but that doesn't stop '†' being just another frustrating dance music album.

Tony Naylor

[jaxxalude]

Can't you find a better, more reliable, more credible source for reviewing dance music than the indie version of Tigerbeat?

[busyboy]

It's called irony... I mean, I wear my guilty pleasures on my sleeve, you can see that in other threads...

Not that I totally disagree with the review about the format, though. Great production and artistry also have to match the best way to express themselves. Timbaland's Shock Value, anyone? ;)

June 12 Edit: "†" clicked, I'm enjoying it more and more after each new listen. Oh, and I haven't really considered the NME a serious publication ever since the Blur/Oasis "media war" in the summer of 1995.

[busyboy]

Will this one do? ;)

Justice
†
[Ed Banger; 2007]
Rating: 8.4

Everyone should be wary of pulling out the following two statements, but they fit Justice like a pair of $500 jeans: 1) If it's too loud, you're too old, and 2) Age ain't nothin' but a number. Given the hilariously horrified reaction that many in the dance music community have when confronted with the music of French duo Justice, you'd think they were two 300-pound rampaging Huns who sacked Berlin's Panorama Bar and made off with Ricardo Villalobos and Ellen Allien over their shoulders. Instead, Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay-- high school kids when Daft Punk's Homework dropped over a decade ago-- grew up, like many a young Parisian, filtering hard rock (never a French strong suit) through disco until it sounded more Judas Priest circa 1983 than Stardust circa 1998. Their "new French touch," as the genre's being termed, actually feels like the caress of a sledgehammer.

Throughout †, Justice's long-awaited debut album, Augé and de Rosnay genuflect again and again in front of the Stations of French Dance Music: The metallic ripples of Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo's Crydamoure label, which once sizzled your ear hairs; Thomas Bangalter's Roulé imprint, and its champagne kisses and Chaka Khan dreams; the coke-mirror reflections of idealized 80s keyboards in Alan Braxe and Fred Falke's work; the tongue-lolling hip-hop buffoonery of TTC; Mr. Oizo's spritzing-sphincter bass and convulsing keyboards; and Jackson's OCD vocal edits. Listen to the Cassius-esque disco-twang of "Genesis" and tell me these guys are somehow dance-ignorant. But like two naughty schoolboys, they've got their fingers crossed behind their backs the whole time; one thing the duo is not is reverent.

Justice takes this history of the French rave era and blows it out by embracing 21st-century stadium-rock production. They squeeze everything into a mid-range frequency band so loud that the riffs on tracks like "Let There Be Light" and "Stress" practically cock-slap you in the face. ("Stress" in particular sounds like a disco-era string arranger came to an in-house orchestra with the injunction "make it sound like Emergency Broadcast System.") The drums on "Let There Be Light" and their big breakthrough single "Waters of Nazareth" are the rat-a-tat rhythms of electro scraping like Freddie Kruger's fingertips along the slimy walls of some basement dungeon. That's it-- engorged electronic riffs, dizzying astringent strings, vocal samples torqued to all hell, and nasty metallic drums. It's astoundingly unsubtle stuff and bracing as fuck, a decade's worth of French electronic music stripped down like a Peugeot parked overnight in a bad neighborhood.

Of course, if that's all † was, it would be unbearable for a full hour, and Justice's critics might have half a point. But the album's more varied than most folks will give it credit for. (Unfortunately, that variety also includes "The Party", featuring Ed Banger's abhorrent in-house female rapper Uffie.) "D.A.N.C.E."-- the album's slightly incongruous, Schoolhouse Rock-esque filter-disco track-- is Justice's only obvious stab at a capital-p pop crossover hit and you'll certainly be humming "Do the D-A-N-C-E, 1-2-3-4-5" whether you want to or not after hearing it. But like Homework, † is a harsh and mostly instrumental set that nonetheless plays like the ideal crossover electronic-pop record. Justice knows how to sequence a dance album to avoid drag and boredom, a skill more suited to hook-friendly architects than a putative demolition crew. The wistful instrumental vignette "Valentine", coming after the one-two slap of "Phantom Pt. 1" and "Phantom Pt. 2", is like a sour, palette cleansing appetizer between fat-rich courses in big ol' French meal.

But well-sequenced or not, † is also a sensation-for-sensation's-sake record, something French house has always excelled out-- even when it's been more classy than crass. Cheekily disregarding so many things that good dance music is "supposed" to have-- especially, you know, bass-- and in a post-microhouse era where "quality sound design" is a fetishistic obsession, Justice's digital distortion, 128kb-grade hyper-compression, and sometimes aggressively un-funky house sprays good taste with its pissed-up, pissed-off 3 a.m. musk. They've somehow managed split dance music into a brother-against-brother battle, turning message boards into minefields and blog posts into mini-manifestos. There's no mystery to Justice tracks, true. But whether it's deep house revelers out of their heads on jacked-up gospel or folks in German basements getting down to their own form of minimalized riffing, club rats all over the world are just trying to have a good time. Even if Justice is more about throwing devil horns than doing the hustle, well, we're all still in the same gang.

-Jess Harvell, June 12, 2007

[busyboy]

The album is out all over the world except the US by now!

I guess only a few reviews are out at the moment, here's a couple.

Comfort Comes

This summer is shaping up to be one of the strongest regarding dance music in a long time. We got Digitalism, Chemical Brothers, Simian Mobile Disco, and a new Unkle record all for us to sink our teeth into. The Justice record had to be on the top of the pile as one of the most anticipated albums of the year for any genre. Justice are a duo who hail from France and with the French connection there is an influence of the infamous Daft Punk in this record. You can hear elements of “Homework” and “Discovery” scattered throughout the record. But, if all you heard is “DANCE” then you will be surprised by the rest of the record as it is Justice pop song.

The album starts off with “Gensis” and it is quite an epic start to the record with this odd sounding very 80s with some very funky hooks. While “Let There Be Light” is there anthem and their declaration of intent. “The Party” features label mate Uffie feels incredibly awkward at times as Uffie talks about how much she wants to party. But, it works in its own weird and strange way. The now legendary “Waters to Nazareth” sounds fresh and that is very thick and tender yet chewy as well.

Justice record is remarkably solid from top to bottom. There is going to be many who will discuss and compare this record to Simian Moblie Disco’s record both are worth your attention but for me its to close to call right now as both bring a lot to the table. But, no matter how hard you try you may never stop singing "Do the D-A-N-C-E, 1-2-3-4-5."

Score: 8.5

[busyboy]

The Observer

Justice, †



The acidic French pair claim they make music 'without knowing how to do it'. So why are they so astonishing, asks Sarah Boden

It's a decade since Daft Punk's extraordinary album Homework opened the floodgates for a cross-Channel invasion and rearranged the face of dance music.

These days, we're dancing to the beat of another Gallic boy duo. Parisian noise renegades Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Auge made their mark with the maddening, pitched-up reworking of indie band Simian's 'Never Be Alone'. But it was the rasping, brutally phased analogue buzz of 2005's 'Waters of Nazareth' that truly excited people. It showcased a sound so seismic that it induced nausea if you pranced too close to the club speaker stacks. 'Nazareth"s evil textures resonated around clubland and lit the touch paper for a score of electro-disco radicals, among them Simian Mobile Disco, formed from the cinders of Simian.

Article continues
It helps that Gaspard and Xavier exude a particularly insouciant brand of French cool. While DJing, Xavier routinely smokes entire males who are into other males without once lifting them from his lips, and the pair play live in front of a stack of Marshall amps. Moreover, they maintain that they're bedroom auteurs; graphic designers who simply stumbled upon their art and 'do music without really knowing how to do it'.

This guileless approach is captured in †'s quixotic alchemy. It's composed of equal parts Seventies funk, the cheesy wing of filter disco, acid house's distorted beats and hip hop's battering rhythms. Somehow, however, it is thrillingly transgressive, its darkly funky basslines evoking George Clinton booty-shaking at a Depeche Mode gig.

There is innovation and potential commercial appeal here, then, but you can't help but wonder whether they've pushed the sonic envelope too far to cross over. For starters, take the distinctly unpronounceable title. Despite the tongue-in-cheek 'Christian/Club' genre label on their MySpace site, and the biblical song titles, the allusion is aesthetic. It lends an aura of gravitas, for sure, but it takes a foolhardy pop act to casually co-opt such potent imagery.

Furthermore, Justice wound up clubland's cognoscenti by saying that their debut would be 'definitely music for girls and music for driving cars'. In the event, † is not entirely devoid of gossamer touches.

There is nothing as guzzlingly addictive as 'Never Be Alone', but their plucky experimentation offers up a number of dancefloor treats. 'D.A.N.C.E', notably, is a one-of-a-kind. Summoning the gospel joyousness of Baby's Gang's 'Happy Song' - an early Eighties Italo disco number - it is one of the few tunes to feature a trilling children's singalong and still maintain a semblance of cool. 'DVNO', a robotic jam featuring Parisian's Scenario Rock, offers a futuristic take on the high-spirited MOR of Hall and Oates. And while there are moments of muzaky electronica that you'll no doubt skip - 'Valentine' and 'The Party' are presumably included to lend light and shade but merely fall flat - it's the doom-laden power chords of album opener 'Genesis', which stomps its way across the discotheque like Godzilla, that sets the tone for the best tracks. 'Let There Be Light', 'Stress' and 'Phantom' are wordless tunes punctuated by burping sub-bass and finished with a cerebral Euro synth veneer.

'Stress', in fact, may be the most claustrophobic club pounder you've ever encountered. Its piercing, incessant strings are married to a shuffling beat; think Psycho's Norman Bates doing the moonwalk. The two-part 'Phantom', meanwhile, has elegant strings that are brilliantly at odds with a build-up and drop which leaves you beaming with malevolent glee. And despite its familiarity, 'Waters of Nazareth' still wages a war of attrition on your eardrums.

At its core, † is loud, restless, and daring. A creative tour de force, Justice have unleashed an era-defining album for the children of acid house. Never mind Daft Punk, here's disco punk.

Download: 'Stress'; 'Genesis'

[busyboy]

Justice - '†'

Released on 18/06/07
Label: Ed Banger

Run by former Daft Punk manager Pedro Winter (aka Busy P), Ed Banger is perhaps the hippest of a bunch of deeply hip Parisian labels that have been greeted with open arms in East London. Like its more musically varied counterpart, Kitsune, it's hard not to admire the coherence of Ed Banger's pristine cool, from sleeve art to synth module. As Thom Yorke would have it, everything is in its right place.

Look deeper into their roster however and you're forced to question whether the vacuous scenester chic served up by the likes of Lolita pin-up Uffie is worthy of anything more than a Gallic shrug. But that's when Justice duo, Gaspard Auge and Xavier de Rosnay, step up to the DJ booth and force you to fall in love with filtered French house all over again. So hyperkinetic is their choppy, processed and overdriven groove that you're inclined to 'air DJ' whilst listening; tapping in effects with imaginary cross-faders, flicking fantastical kill switches to drop impossibly elastic bass lines.

Fundamentally, tracks like "New Jack", "D.A.N.C.E." and the fearsome "Waters Of Nazareth" - which played everywhere from indie discos to East Berlin clubs last year - are built for parties. Like their spiritual mentors, Daft Punk, the sheen of snappy '80s groove and disco strings provides the glitterball moments and a tough Chicago/Detroit jackin' repetition does the rest. And like those forebears, Justice are too imaginative and talented to remain constrained by the declining phenomenon of the club 12 inch.

If there's a flaw with this relentlessly 'up' album, it is perhaps its own distinctiveness. Justice essentially have two modes: funky techno built with filthy overdriven synth sounds and gleefully daft disco/'80s pastiche so shiny as to be almost reflective. Both are held together with a studio rigour that makes the record bounce out of the speakers so forcefully that the moments of synthesis, where the sound coheres into its trademark elastic groove, become utterly addictive. Album opener "Genesis" eases from the first bars of a Godzilla sample into a shiny wall of 21st century production funk with enough poise that you almost lose interest in what follows.

Like most party soundtracks stretched to LP length, "†" may ultimately prove less satisfying than the more varied and nuanced textures of human performance or the subtle grace of genuinely forward-thinking electronic music. But never underestimate the power of cheap thrills.



by James Poletti

[busyboy]

musicOHM review



It seems an eternity since Justice arrived on the dance floor with an experimental remix of Simian's Never Be Alone under their tight leather jackets. That was three years ago, which in the industry, goes by like doggy years.

A flurry of remixes and the monumental electro anthem Waters of Nazareth followed, before a re-release of We Are You Friends finally convinced Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Auge to quit their graphic designer jobs and turn a bedroom pastime into a full time job.

Perhaps the biggest pressure on them was to produce an album's worth of their own material, as many a frustrated Justice fan can testify. So here it is, fatefully released the same day as the debut album of Simian Mobile Disco, whose own ascent has mirrored Rosnay and Auge's.

On the first few listens the album surprisingly drifts you by. One quarter of it people have already heard on EPs and the material beyond this doesn't grab you by the collar in the same way SMD's album does.

Give the album a bit more time and it does open up wonderfully. Genesis washes Rosnay and Auge's now famed distortion heavy sound with funky hooks and 80s era NYC beats. Current single DANCE melds disco with a London Children's choir. It's insanely catchy and could be this summer's We Are Your Friends. Not bad for a song written as a tribute to Michael Jackson.

New Jack finds Justice with their production hats on, fleshing and meshing cuts of Miami house, funk and fuzzy electro. The apocalyptic Phantom medley returns broken down into two tracks and is just a hint of how brazen it sounds on the dance floor. The Valentine is an unexpected gem, sheltering under a synth driven melody that breaks up the album's preceding fuzz heavy tracks.

Label mate Uffie provides her lolita vocals for The Party, another synth number which despite Rosnay and Auge's sentiments that it 'perverts' Uffie but 'nicely', come across awkwardly.

Stress picks things up again with leanings towards Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries, it pairs shrilling string arrangements with throbbing bass lines and disco, fading to a guitar pluck before dive bombing into a cleaned up and fresher Waters of Nazareth. One Minute to Midnight clocks out with almost a smirk like nod to Daft Punk.

It sums up an album where Justice wear their influences so flagrantly. Rosnay and Auge openly admit they're no producers and have minimal knowledge of sound engineering. It tells in some respects, though in others they've produced some remarkable work. It stops short of SMD's effort by quite a way, but it's a fine and much welcome showing for a pair of self-professed amateurs.

- Jamil Ahmad

[busyboy]

Stylus review:

Rating: B+

qu’est-ce que-c’est? The electronic music section at San Francisco’s Amoeba Records has a hastily written sign proclaiming “We now have Ed Banger 12-inches!” with a big arrow pointing towards a shiny row of wax by SebastiAn, Uffie, DJ Mehdi, and Justice. Ed Banger Records’ curious collection of leather-clad Parisian hipsters has ascended to the top of what has become a second French Touch revolution. They’ve clambered through European and U.S. club circuits by seizing the house filters and funky samples out of Daft Punk’s robotic grasp and pairing them with noisy, electro-infused synths and beats. 2007 has seen the label and their abrasive sound enjoy some of its biggest successes, including a massive DJ tour, whispers of “nu-rave” sibling status, and handwritten Amoeba publicity. French duo Justice (consisting of twenty-somethings Gaspard Auge and Xavier de Rosnay) is one of the label’s most recognized acts, and has finally released their debut LP after four years of DP-inspired club bangers.

At any rate: †. Yep, it’s named †, the typographical dagger-cross. Ed Banger head Pedro Winter, who just happens to manage a certain fake robot house duo on the side, told the Guardian of the name (pronounced “cross”): "We don't give a f**k. There's no name on the cover, no band logo, the album is just †." This is the sort of shameless promotion Winter (aka Busy P) is known for, breathlessly talking up his acts to crowds before shows and tossing memorabilia into the audience during sets. His pusher style and his label’s ADD electro-fuzz have given rise to the use of the identifier “blog house,” a reference to the initial online groundswell enjoyed by Banger and fellow French label Kitsune. But it’s rather sloppy musicology to categorize them by the media by which they’ve been exposed. In what is sure to be their one brief moment of young cultural relevance, these guys at least deserve a genre name composed of some arbitrary permutation of the genres they rip off… say, Electro touch. Catchy, no?

The weird thing about Justice is that they’re rarely the same frenetic Electro touch group when playing a set or, say, making an LP as they are on their singles or remixes or Busy P-chaperoned DJ sets. † is a big party record with a few exciting beats, as well as one of the few examples of desirable audio clipping. Older cuts “Waters of Nazareth,” “Let There Be Light” and “Phantom” appear, but these established hits are spread out, with ephemeral new material providing overly long buffers. “D.A.N.C.E.,” the spectacular first single off †, plays off a school-children sample and has more in common with the Go! Team than Blog house.

Auge and de Rosnay sometimes stray surprisingly far from their core competency—earsplitting levels—to mixed results. Provocative MC Uffie, obviously hoping to grab market share from the Peaches/Fannypack/Avenue D sector, guests here for a singsongy clubbing ode, “The Party,” dripping with half-ironies about getting drunk and making out. When “The Party” gets played at hip dance meccas like San Francisco’s Rickshaw Stop, which it almost assuredly will, it’ll undoubtedly be tough to parse whether Uffie’s getting a laugh at those fashionable, druggy party girls, or if she endorses the lifestyle herself.

Ed Banger has been riding a wave of cred with these sorts of nocturnal partygoers for a while, continuously avoiding major media coverage. This could be partially due to the expectation of the scene to collapse under its own weight before proving its importance. A lot of people were predicting † to signal the beginning of the end: the sonic boom of the hype machine finally overtaking the scene’s jams. But instead of a rock-and-roll style burnout, † is, if anything, going to cause the old notions of Ed Banger to fade away. Breaking from the party-all-night aesthetic, † fuzzes up more calculatingly and less abrasively on tracks like “The Party,” “One Minute to Midnight,” and “D.A.N.C.E.” Sure, there are a couple of pain points and the sequencing is a bit limp, but if you consider that Justice really just want to be Daft Punk Jr., and that fully half of Human After All sucked, then Justice have achieved an astounding success. Oui oui!

Mike Orme

[busyboy]

Drowned in Sound review:

Kev Kharas

The task of reviewing Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay's debut record was passed onto me with a quandary: how to pin down in words an album that was made for dancing to?

Justice’s schtick is an evasive one – by turns heavy and light, they recall ‘80s pop-metal as much as they do another, more frequent comparison(s? No, just Dxft Pxnk). For me, the most ready parallels run alongside the Renegade Hardware nights that blitz the End at irregular intervals; rolling drum ‘n’ bass that is dark, tech and narkily pomp-ed.

If their debut record was to teeter either way, I reckon it’d fall towards that latter; ‘it’ being less a collection of songs and more an interlocked, production line mix of lashing synths and hair-raising, razor’s-edge, gravel-grazing skruzz. Listening to † (or Cross) feels like wandering around a deserted factory in the witching hours, haunted machines left on autopilot, diodes eyeball-rolling and contingent parts clunking. The feeling of forward momentum is ever-present, the expectation is that something is being produced, such is the record’s solidity of form and purpose. A sense of direction, then, that suggests all will be revealed when the album arrives on the conveyor at the end of its run.

For all this determined noise though, † is never less than fun – the Parisian duo stay playful enough to make the climax of every track seem like a clash with the end-of-level boss from a platform video game. Justice know when to curtail the industrial strike and dazzle you with some star-skipping pop-chime, or a warble of gloopy future funk, before tossing you back into the unlit mire. The best example of this is the record’s centre-piece 'The Party', a (slightly) slowed-down break of house dripping with a typically ammonia-tongued cameo from label-mate Uffie.

The track manages, by way of major chords and a certain quotient of feel-good cheese, to transport the lairy nymph to some time a generation or so from now, when our children are celebrating their parents' youth at cod-‘new-rave’ disco nights in a warehouse somewhere on a West London industrial estate. She’ll sound brilliantly tame compared to whoever’s ripping it in 2032, like Randy Crawford on 'Street Life' or Salt’N’Pepa do now. † is not without its feminine moments. Packing this kind of starry-eyed discoball kitsch, 'The Party' has synths that come on like the Christiane F. soundtrack with laughing gas instead of smack, until those synths smack back in on ‘DVNO’. The party builds...

And builds...

And builds, into a call-and-response tussle of dialectics between tune and beat. Soon the truth of a wicked rave (yes) is pulled from an urban myth rooted in word-of-mouth and fly posters mottled onto electricity boxes. The overriding impression you get from † is that it's a record its creators enjoyed making – how could throwing all this noise and tapered, dumpy drum out from your imagination onto a blank, rolling tape not be fun?

Ultimately, it’s this ad hoc approach that makes it hard to describe an album like † without throwing words at it – words of things it reminds you of, words like zinc and caustic, words with z and x. The Star Light Zone on Sonic the Hedgehog; the Metropolis Zone on Sonic 2; Event Horizon; Professor Burp’s Bubbleworks; Renegade Hardware's Skool of Hard Knocks comp; tazers, lazers, chixx with mixers; space junk; space funk; My Little Pony and the Ghost Train. So what am I doing here? I'm presenting you with the finished article at the end of Justice's production line. What will come rising up and out from the black? Who knows. That's what makes it fun. And whatever it is, it's gonna sting.

[busyboy]

Justice Eat House Music Alive, Spit Out Bones

by Tom Breihan

The French electro duo Justice may be this year's fresh new dance music hope/hype, but the music on †, their just-leaked debut album, only barely qualifies as dance music. On a purely physical level, it's nearly as tough an album to listen to as anything I've heard from the No Fun Fest axis in recent years. The duo doesn't just ignore old dance constructs like flow and build and sweep; they actively work to sabotage them, pushing instead toward compression and distortion and disruption, doing everything they can to smash their own momentum. Everything falls all over itself. Melodies lumber awkwardly when they could swoop and soar, in-the-red synths always seem to be on the verge of decomposing completely, disco strings divebomb in from nowhere and disappear just as suddenly. The whole thing is a seething, violent mess, and even in its most accessible moments it never lets up. A few weeks ago, I had this to say about Justice: their "midrange-addled filter-metal bangers have the same problem as their Skint Records spiritual forbears: they've got coked-up delirium down, but they don't have a whole lot to offer beyond that." I was more right about Justice than I originally thought: † doesn't just exploit the adrenal exhilaration of coke; it also wallows in the gritted-teeth edginess that comes with the drug, a celebratory sort of stress. One song is actually called "Stress," and it's a perfect case in point, a jagged pileup of looped, layered, diced Bernard Herrmann strings that wriggle and dart and pound like jackhammers, eventually making room for sirens and dentists'-drill sound-effects. Seriously, I can't listen to this record without first gritting my teeth. It's chaotic and assaultive and relentless, and, um, I sort of like it.

The album, I've found, improves enormously if you imagine it as a filter-disco equivalent to the Shop Boyz' "Party Like a Rockstar." Like that novelty-rap summer-jam, Justice swipe all the most obvious signifiers of rock, and the result ends up closer to a Ritalin-addled 11-year-old's idea of rock than anything the genre itself has resembled since 1989 or so. Justice pull riffs and tricks from power-metal, crunching their synths triumphantly and even flipping an Iron Maiden song title on "One Minute to Midnight." That emphasis on anarchic, riled-up hedonism makes for an oddly unified album. Parts of † sound something like late-90s Daft Punk if they'd been forced to record at early-80s basement-hardcore levels of fidelity. Justice like to let pretty synth-swooshes creep in during their tracks' final minutes, and it's almost like they're teasing us, showing us that they could actually make glorious disco-house if they wanted but that they'd prefer to take a sledgehammer to that stuff and smash it up beyond recognition. Still, disco-house always lurks just below their turbulent surfaces, always threatening to break through and shower us in glitter but never quite succeeding. And those pop instincts, the mere presence of which prevent this from turning into Atari Teenage Riot, usually sound better when they've been self-consciously mangled than they would if they'd been allowed to take their natural forms. Take, for example, "The Party," which features vocals from Ed Banger's resident white-chick rapper Uffie. Uffie is a pretty loathsome character; her cadence suggests an elementary-school guidance-counselor onstage at an assembly rapping about how you should stay in school, and her lyrics are the sort of club-rap pastiche that I can't imagine anyone still thinks is funny: "Out in the street, all the taxis are showing me love / Cause I shine like a princess in the middle of thugs." But Justice effectively neutralize Uffie by burying her under layers of distorted but still gleaming electropop and, apropos of nothing, letting a stuttering vocal sample from Three 6 Mafia's "Stay Fly" stagger around through the tumult like a zombie. A destroyed Uffie, it turns out, is a lot more fun than a fully intact Uffie.

Justice has already had two great pop moments: their Simian remix "We Are Your Friends" and their own "Waters of Nazareth." Before I heard †, I was skeptical as to whether they'd be able to maintain that propulsion over the length of an entire album. For the most part, they don't. When "Waters of Nazareth" shows up near the end of the album, its surging oilcan stomp absolutely obliterates everything that's come before. And I absolutely wouldn't mind going the rest of my life without hearing "Stress" ever again. But in their reptilian fury, Justice have managed to scrape up a shatteringly brutal record that somehow gratifies more often than it annoys and sometimes does both simultaneously. I'm impressed.

[busyboy]

Debuts at #49 in the UK, and at #70 in Europe.

[busyboy]

"†" is out next week in the US, and is streaming on their MySpace page right now.

[busyboy]

The Alan Braxe remix of "D.A.N.C.E."

[busyboy]

Guest List: Justice
Guest List by Xavier de Rosnay

Welcome to the latest edition of Pitchfork's Guest List. Each week, we ask one of our favorite artists to fill us in on what they've been up to lately: which tracks they can't stop spinning, what books they can't put down, and what new bands they've caught on tour. This week it's Xavier de Rosnay, half of the French house duo Justice, who previews his favorite new international bands, inexplicably claims a rental car as his favorite music venue, and doesn't joke around about religion.

>> Favorite Songs of the Past Year

ZZT: "Lower State of Consciousness"
Midnight Juggernauts: "Into the Galaxy"
The White Stripes: "Icky Thump"
James Morrison: "You Give Me Something"
Klaxons: "As Above, So Below"

>> Favorite Older Songs at the Moment

Gilbert O'Sullivan: "Alone Again (Naturally)"
Syreeta Wright: "Your Kiss Is Sweet"
Donna Summer: "Wasted"
Earth, Wind and Fire: "In the Stone"
Todd Rundgren: "International Feel"

>> Favorite New Band

Midnight Juggernauts, who are an electronic pop band from Melbourne; and the Fucking Champs, a highly technical baroque metal band.

>> Favorite Song Ever

Probably "Tryouts for the Human Race" by Sparks; or "Don't Stop Me Now" by Queen.

>> Best Recent Concert

Fancy, a French rock band. They're so good at their instruments they can focus just on the show. And above everything, the songs are great. A proper experience.

>> Last Great Film I Saw

Ocean's 13

>> Last Great Book I Read

The Bible (this is not a joke).

>> Favorite Piece of Musical Equipment

Apple Macintosh G5

>> Favorite Record Shop

Our favorite ones are the mainstream ones like HMV, Virgin Megastore or FNAC. We bought five [pairs] of the same headphones cause we break a lot of those. Sony MDR-something.

>> Best Purchase of the Past Year

A Ricoh camera.

>> Best Thing I Did This Year

Putting out Justice's debut album before I turn 25.

>> Favorite Venue

The car we rented in L.A. when we played Coachella 2007.

>> Favorite TV Show at the Moment

"Lost"

>> My Ringtone

A shitty jazz ringtone included in my phone by default. I put it very loud; it's so unbearable it wakes me up every morning, which is something I need.

[busyboy]

Metascore (9 reviews):

[busyboy]

Playlouder review...



It's always a concern of mine when people begin to win huge plaudits from behind production desks or turntables, or at least when there's a fuzzy artist/producer/remixer overlap to try to get around. Take Timbaland, for example. What does he actually do? At any given time there seems to be a plethora of excitable worshippers in my ear telling me how he has somehow "saved pop music" and yet what does this really boil down to? Crafting a few rent-a-beats for mediocre hip-pop acts like Missy Elliott is essentially the size of it, as I see it. So my cynical backroom staff baiting antennae naturally shot up when I heard about this French electro-house duo Justice who, it seemed, had "created" last year's finest dancefloor smash by remixing Simian's 'Never Be Alone' and releasing it under the associated moniker 'We Are Your Friends'. It didn't take a genius, in my eyes, to spot that said tune was a bit useful and also rather dancefloor friendly, or at least only a few throbbing basslines and recycled drum loops away from being so. OK let's be clear about this: I'm not so stuffy and archaic as to not enjoy a good remix but a bit of perspective about non-artist praise I think goes a long way. Measured acclaim for that contribution please, at best.

But here's the acid test and credit to Gaspard Auge and Xavier de Rosnay (for they are Justice) for not stalling on a full length of their own material. It would have been easy - you suspect - for them to hover around the ultra-hip fringes of mainstream dance culture on the back of 'We Are Your Friends' earning bucketloads just for adding their currently hip imprint to anything they fancied, without essentially doing a great deal. Paul Oakenfold seems to have carved a 15-year long career out of this very practice, after all.

So what does their own stuff sound like? Well, comparisons to Daft Punk abound and this is not, you will discover, unfair. However, whereas Daft Punk always appeared content to kick-start and shape the disco - even just to be there in the first place - Justice seem intent on doing it some significant harm. This is altogether nastier, occasionally uglier stuff. It's 'Discovery' wired up to several thousand volts. Then thrown into a volcano. Strapped to fireworks.

Bad moments are scarce. I count two, and even these are open to debate - the slight schlock pop of 'D.A.N.C.E.' (not without its easy-going charm and an obvious single but a little sickly sweet after repeated listens) and the slight Go West-isms of 'DVNO', which also at times conjures up images of Mark King giving it the old high-torsoed funky bass slap (I'm fairly sure there'll be a Level 42 revival at some point but I want none of it). Everywhere else it thumps and pulsates like a brute - the two best tunes showing up late in the form of the monstrous 'Stress' (Gary Numan's 'Cars' satisfyingly hoofed up the arse by Autechre in an unusually straight-shooting frame of mind, maybe) and earlier single 'Waters Of Nazareth', more measured but no less infectious in its frenetic electro-funk intentions. The cutesy chimes of 'Valentine' stand out as something a little different but it's another easy winner. And the fluid transition of opener 'Genesis' into 'Let There Be Light' (both outstanding) betrays an obvious desire to parade their undoubted DJ talents. But then why shouldn't they? Yep, the full gamut of vital dance music is here.

So harking back to my original point: if you're only involved at arm's length, it stands to reason, you can't really trip up. Sometimes with that added mystique comes a kind of impenetrable, impossible-to-analyse cool. These are very much the rules of a lot of dance music and hip-hop production, sadly. But music - however chic and cutting-edge it aspires to be - is about taking risks, and if this here record ever constituted a risk it arrogantly slaps any and all potential gremlins squarely across the chops with a tired Gallic shrug. Justice clearly have no desire to be kept at arm's length of the hand-dirtying process of crafting genius dance music. Great stuff.

They've totally nailed it. I am through with cynicism. Perhaps. Court is adjourned and ordered to "get down" this instant.

James Hinchcliffe

[busyboy]

Out today in the US!

[busyboy]

All Music Guide review:



by Jason Lymangrover

French boys Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Augé originally got their start in the music scene playing in bad Metallica and Nirvana cover bands, and the album art of Cross makes it look like a doomy metalcore release, but the record is anything but metal. In fact, it's almost everything but metal. It's a grimy mix of dancehall, techno, '80s R&B, and lounge with Clockwork Orange synths, deadly static crunches, hard-hitting kicks, grinding groans, and a spliced slap-popping bass that recalls Michael Jackson's disco classic, Off the Wall. The songs are scattered and chopped to all hell, but they often feel revolutionary. This is partially due to the duo's "anything goes" attitude. It's as if Justice is reacting to complacency in latter day electronic music and seeing how far they can take their slicing and dicing before the chopped up compositions fall apart. At certain moments, samples are dissected into such little snippets that it's hard to even decipher the instrument from the clicks and pops in-between the splices. Usually when the songs unravel to this point, they suddenly halt and get reeled back in to cohesion like a fishing lure that has been swept into the rapids. Instead of using their laptops to keep their beats tight and precise, Justice uses them to shake up their songs to such a gnarled, jittery point that they sometimes sound like mistakes. These happy accidents give the tunes a humanistic touch, as though these futuristic beats have been deconstructed by cavemen. While the instrumentals are often sinister and melancholy, as if they were concocted in a cold, cavernous atmosphere (which they were, in Rosnay's basement), the tracks with vocals are perfectly designed for a hot nightclub. "DVNO" has disco handclaps and bouncy vocals that sound like they were ripped from Oingo Boingo, "D.A.N.C.E." is tricked out with a Go! Team double-dutch flavor, and "Ththhee ppaarrttyy" incorporates a cute-voiced rapper coaxing her friends to get "drunk and freaky fried" over a keyboard potentially lifted from Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants. At the darker end of the dance spectrum, "Stress" is an exhausting exercise in patience with a teapot whistle screaming over a tension-building Space Invaders type bassline, and "Waters of Nazareth" combines a crunchy church organ with a bottom-heavy synthesizer rolling in gravel. Admirably random samples dug up from underground sources like '70s Italian prog-rockers Goblin, combined with a reckless abandon and an adherence to melodic hooks, makes Cross one of the most interesting electro-crossovers since Ratatat, and the guys in Justice do an excellent job building on Daft Punk's innovative foundation.

[busyboy]

US debuts:

#1 on the Top Electronic Albums chart
#14 on the Top Heatseekers chart
#42 on the Top Independent Albums chart

From Indie HQ:

42 JUSTICE CROSS

This Week: 2800
Total: 2,900

Paris production team puts out their latest dance album. Note that right below this #42 spot is a self-titled album at the #56 spot. Looks as though the digital album although exactly the same has a different title. Most interesting is that the digital album sold almost as many copies as the physical product. The $7.99 itunes price tag had to help.

56 JUSTICE JUSTICE 2,068 2,068

This Week: 2100
Total: 2,100

[busyboy]

Justice Launch North American Tour
Add dates with CSS

Whether or not Kanye decides to crash their party again and appear on stage saying "Hold up, hold up, this is my crowd. I paid a million dollars for this crowd!", we fully expected Justice to hold it down on their tour of almost-- but not quite-- everywhere in the world.

That tour's North American leg begins tonight, October 5, in Mexico, and, as if their own crunchy beats weren't enough, they've added a handful of UK dates in December with notorious party-starters CSS. Not a bad addition to a tour that just keeps going, and going, and going, until December 15.

Lest any one of us forgets just how giving Justice are, there is also the matter of that "D.A.N.C.E." remix EP, which is out now.

Dates:

10-05 Col. Ampliacion, Mexico - Salon Vive Cuervo
10-06 Los Angeles, CA - Detour Music Festival (DJ set)
10-07 San Diego, CA - Canes *
10-08 Los Angeles, CA - Henry Fonda Theater *
10-09 Los Angeles, CA - Henry Fonda Theater *
10-10 San Francisco, CA - Mezzanine *
10-11 Portland, OR - Holocene
10-12 Seattle, WA - Neumos *
10-13 Vancouver, British Columbia - Commodore Ballroom *
10-16 Minneapolis, MN - Foundation Nightclub
10-17 Chicago, IL - Metro *
10-18 Toronto, Ontario - Republik *
10-19 Montreal, Quebec - Metropolis (two shows) *
10-20 New York, NY - Terminal 5 *
10-21 Philadelphia, PA - Starlight Ballroom *
10-22 New York, NY - Terminal 5 *
10-25 London, England - Koko (Electric Proms)
10-26 Amiens, France - Picardie Moov' Festival (DJ set)
10-27 Reims, France - Electricity Festival
10-31 Nantes, France - L'Olympic
11-01 Strasbourg, France - La Laiterie
11-02 Nancy, France - L'Autre Canal
11-03 Clermont Ferrand, France - La Cooperative
11-08 Lyon, France - Le Transbordeur
11-09 Paris, France - Zenith (Festival des Inrocks)
11-10 Gent, Belgium - I Love Techno Festival
11-15 Tolouse, France - Le Phare
11-16 Bordeaux, France - Parc des Expos
11-17 Cean, France - Nordik Impact Festival
11-23 Lille, France - Zenith
11-24 Amsterdam, Netherlands - Paradiso
12-02 Leeds, England - Leeds University #
12-03 London, England - Brixton Academy #
12-04 Manchester, England - Academy #
12-05 Glasgow, Scotland - Academy #
12-07 Birmingham, England - Academy #
12-08 Nottingham, England - Rock City #
12-12 Milan, Italy - Magazzini Generali
12-13 Bologna, Italy - Estragon
12-14 Turin, Italy - Hiroshima
12-15 Rome, Italy - Piper

* with Midnight Juggernauts
# with CSS

[busyboy]

Justice Moving The Crowd On MySpace Tour
Mitchell Peters, L.A.

After launching its inaugural music tour last fall with headliners Say Anything and Hellogoodbye, MySpace has snagged French electronic duo Justice to anchor its second branded trek, set to begin March 3 at Stubbs in Austin, Texas.

Diplo, DJ Mehdi, Chromeo, Busy P and Fancy will appear on select dates of the jaunt, which wraps March 31 at the Mayan Theatre in Los Angeles. Tickets for the Live Nation-produced tour go on sale tomorrow (Jan. 9), available through the MySpace Music Tour profile and other outlets. The tour page will also features a Justice tour diary, music videos, backstage photos and other offerings.

The Paris-based duo, Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspart Auge, received a number of Grammy nods this year, including best electronic/dance album and best dance recording for single "D.A.N.C.E." Justice's full-length album, "†" (aka "Cross"), debuted at No. 1 on the Top Electronic Albums chart in July, and has sold 39,000 copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Along with Say Anything and Hellogoodbye, MySpace's first-ever tour in October featured Young Love, along with MySpace Records artists Polysics, Dr. Manhattan and Socratic. The social networking site plans to hold branded concert events every fall and spring.