Audio, Video, Disco
Ironic dance duo return, minus the irony.
Ed Power, 28 Oct 2011
If dance music is the new stadium rock – and the beery, shirtless throngs worshipping at the boots of Deadmau5, Skrillex, David Guetta etc. indicate that this is so – proudly mulleted Parisian duo Justice did most to shift the paradigm. On their 2007 debut they married thonking rave beats and soft metal schlock, resulting in a record that couldn’t make up its mind whether it wanted to be the hard house Teen Spirit or Spinal Tap for pill-neckers.
Subsequently they played up the wink and nudge angle, bedecking their live sets with (unplugged) Marshall Amp stacks whilst donning leather jackets and Kings Of Leon sideburns. Crucially, however, the headbanger motifs never overwhelmed the music, so that it was possible to appreciate their songs at an entirely non-ironic level.
Four years later, though, it appears Justice have started to confuse image with reality. As the hairy riffings on early stand-out ‘Canon’ makes clear, they’ve transitioned from a dance outfit which wants to look like a ‘70s rock band to a dance outfit quite keen on sounding like one. Thus we are invited to mosh along to the poodle-rock stomp of ‘Brain-vision’ and wave a metaphorical lighter in time to the worryingly ballad-like ‘On ‘n On’. To be fair, Audio, Video, Disco isn’t quite the genre-humping car-crash it might read like on paper. It says a great deal for their studio chops that Justice can write something like ‘Ohio’, a straightforwardly sincere homage to Crosby Stills And Nash that morphs into the Prodigy halfway through, and emerge with dignity untarnished. Overall, what you’ve got is an album as artificial as a stick-on droopy moustache – and almost as much of a hoot when enjoyed in the appropriate context.
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