Lords of the dance
Up from the underground, the French duo Justice is bringing electro grooves into the mainstream
Back in the day, well before Justice became the electro brand, but long after the release of those first breakneck beats, Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Augé settled on the cross: a 6-foot-tall prop crafted out of glass and steel and backlit by a fusillade of bright bulbs.
This was in 2005 and '06, when every other member of France's dance scene was brawling for recognition amid what de Rosnay calls "the same neon colors, the same projection screens, the same beats." Justice, instead, had turned toward the world of rock 'n' roll, copping initially (and liberally) from a theatric tradition pioneered by Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath.
"We wanted white color and black, and no other color," de Rosnay says from his home in Paris. "We wanted to invert the traditional thinking, bring out those huge stacks of Marshall [amplifiers], and play with the heavy-metal elements we'd grown up with."
Light, of course, wasn't exactly enough - neither, unfortunately, were the amp stacks - and soon Justice began toting around the oversize cross to their shows, where it dominated the stage and became a focal point for the audience.
"Religion and music," de Rosnay, 25, says. "Here's two things that can have a powerful appeal to a mass audience. Religion and music are the two things that can get 20,000 people together, raising their hands at the same moment." He pauses, and then adds, "We want to turn music into a spiritual experience. Something more than a rock show or an electronic concert."
Few young musicians would risk such a sweeping, swaggering statement of faith. (And few, it should be said, could sound so perfectly at ease making it.) But de Rosnay and Augé, who headline the sold-out MySpace Music Tour at the Paradise Rock Club tomorrow night, long since gave up feinting at humility.
Justice, in recent months, has become that rare and beautiful thing: an electro act popular in the clubs and on the turntables, but even more popular outside, in the mainstream market, where it was widely recognized as one of the most influential acts of 2007.
Last fall, Augé and de Rosnay's first full-length album, "{dagger}," was nominated for a Grammy in the dance/electronic category. It lost, but Justice sold thousands of records, anyway, and ended up selling out its first few tours.
It was a success rooted in a deft combination of "the rawness of rock and punk and the groove and speed of electronic dance," says David Bruno, a New York DJ who writes an influential electro column for the music blog Brooklyn Vegan. "Even kids who listened to pretty mellow indie rock for their formative years ended up picking up on what Justice was up to," he says.
De Rosnay and Augé, in other words, had tapped into the same live current as LCD Soundsystem, Chromeo, and Hot Chip - a hybridization of rock and disco that has made the indie snobs dance. (See accompanying story on D15.) Now, Justice is "spreading so quickly it is hard to overlook the saturation," Bruno says. "New subgenres are popping up daily off of the Justice-inspired crunchy electro sound."
And crunched is where most Justice tracks start: a mosaic of fuzz cobbled together on computers and effects boxes out of what de Rosnay says are "literally thousands of tracks, from Queen" to a handful of obscure metal groups. The groundswell builds slowly, with digressions through snarled, frontloaded chunks of distortion.
On "DVNO," the pay-off punch is a loose-limbed, honeyed chorus delivered over the crowded backbeat. On "Valentine," it's an ascendant keyboard vamp. On "Let There Be Light," it's a sharp, trilling synth, loop over loop over loop, until all you can hear is the noise.
"We try to make disco," says de Rosnay. "But the definition of disco is different. We think of what disco would be like in 2008, full of those rock 'n' roll sounds."
The album's single "D.A.N.C.E." was the record's biggest draw, partially, one assumes, because it indulges so infrequently in Justice's penchant for roughly-hewn riffage. "D.A.N.C.E." is round. It is, for Justice, even relatively soft, pillowed: the chorus is an overweight sample of a children's choir.
"Justice made us love the noise," says Pedro Winter, the manager of the band's label, Ed Banger Records. "Every kind of noise, from the rock to the George Michael pop. I remember hearing the music on their laptop and saying, 'Ooo la la, boys, this is not bedroom music. This is something else altogether.' "
Winter, who also performs under the name Busy P - he is scheduled to open for Justice at the Paradise Rock Club tomorrow - has been involved with de Rosnay and Augé since 2003, when the duo dished out a pair of remixes thick with the now-familiar fuzz.
"In Europe, electronic music is on the radio," Winter says. "It's everywhere. In the US, it's not as big. It belongs to the underground." Justice, he says, is one of the outfits changing that by "appealing to the indie kids. In the US, it's starting to go that way - the linking of indie music and electronic music. It just takes time."
