CMU Approved

Approved: Justice – Audio, Video, Disco

By | Published on Thursday 20 October 2011

Justice

Up to this point, Justice’s output was all about the titanic soundclashes, the fist-pumping synth patterns, the all-out beat warfare. In short, it was electro-pop at its most ear-shattering. But fans of the duo’s stone cold debut ‘†’ needn’t fear, because those qualities are all still omnipresent in Justice’s latest record, ‘Audio, Video, Disco’. They just happen to exist as the not-so humble servants of a fleet of Van Halen-style riffs, camp groove odysseys, and overblown glam-rock flamboyance.

Suffice to say that while it still thrums with the same cracked electrostatic charge of, say, a ‘Waters Of Nazareth’, ‘Audio, Video Disco’ marks a definite shift in sonic stance by Parisian DJs Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay, who with this album have distanced themselves from the more disco-driven sounds of their ‘DANCE’-era days.

According to de Rosnay, the album was recorded piecemeal, at what sounds like a painstaking and often arduous pace. As he told Pitchfork: “We played everything on the album ourselves, but it took a long time to make it because we are not good players. We wrote all the songs in a really simple shape, with just piano and guitar for example, and then we would record it bit by bit. Some live drums were played just to find a good pattern, and then we’d decompose it. Then we would reprogram it. That’s why it took a lot of time; it was really an ant’s job. But live drums are too hard to record, so we chose the simple way”.

Supposed lack of musicianship aside, the feat of construction on ‘Audio’ is undeniably vast. The content is gnarly and metallic, at times ridiculous, but more often bursting at the leather-studded seams with variations on ways to bring a stadium crowd to its knees.

Listen to the album in full here:



READ MORE ABOUT: