Justice - Cross (CD)

All Music Guide

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 RB, and lounge with Clockwork Orange synths, deadly static crunches, hardhitting kicks, grinding groans, and a spliced slappopping 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 latterday 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 pop...s inbetween 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 doubledutch flavor, and "Ththhee Ppaarrttyy" incorporates a cutevoiced 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 tensionbuilding Space Invaders type bassline, and "Waters of Nazareth" combines a crunchy church organ with a bottomheavy synthesizer rolling in gravel. Admirably random samples dug up from underground sources like '70s Italian progrockers Goblin, combined with a reckless abandon and an adherence to melodic hooks, makes Cross one of the most interesting electrocrossovers since Ratatat, and the guys in Justice do an excellent job building on Daft Punk's innovative foundation. - Jason Lymangrover, All Music Guide Read more Less