Review Summary: A unique and compelling foray into modern electronic music.
If the work of Max Mathews in his lab at IBM signaled the infancy of computer music, then Justice’s album ✝ signals its maturation. Following in the footsteps of Daft Punk, French duo Justice released their debut electro-house album ✝ (henceforth referred to as Cross) in 2007 to the welcoming arms of critics. In contrast the easy-listening and repetitive quality that many Daft Punk songs have, Justice’s Cross is characterized by aggressive pacing and an almost dizzying amount of variation. Overall, Cross is a well-rounded musical experience that draws from disco and electronica influences while being consistently engaging and innovative.
Despite being primarily instrumental, Cross is an album that compels your attention at every moment. Justice accomplishes this feat by using distinctive sounds and continuously varying their hooks. This ensures that you’ll never be bored because you’ll never hear quite the same thing twice.
The timbre of the sounds on Cross can be explained by looking at Justice’s equipment: a fleet of Korg synthesizers and a couple of MacBooks. Justice relies on heavily cut up samples, vocoders, grungy synthesizers and more traditional sounding horns and string instruments. Justice owes their distinctive sound to the decades of musical technological development that preceded them; the mixing of sounds that you hear would not have been fathomable even a century ago.
The album starts strong with “Genesis”, a simultaneously grand and ominous opener that moves from a simplistic opening sequence into a groovy rhythm with hints of what can be best described as grungy disco and Thriller. Next comes the steady marching of “Let There Be Light” with its distinctive warbling synth. “Newjack” has a lighter feel, focusing primarily on what sounds like a distorted voice sample and heavy use of broad-spectrum static noise.
The pair of tracks “Phantom” and “Phantom, Part 2” head up the middle of the album. “Phantom” is one of the more dance oriented tracks on the album, offering a strong hook and consistent beats. “Phantom, Part 2” has a similar overall sound to “Phantom” part 1, but varies the melody and focuses more on higher pitched, melodic segments while bringing more recognizable instruments such as horns and violins into the picture. The subsequent “Valentine” has relatively little going on and serves as a palate cleanser for “Tthee Ppaarrttyy”, a track that goes in an uncharacteristic direction.
“Tthee PParrttyy” and “DVNO” bring vocals into the picture, foregoing Justice’s strong instrumental mixing style. “Thhee PPaarrttyy” centers around pedestrian rap vocals from the native Floridian electronic musician Uffie, because of this the band’s characteristic ever-changing instrumentals are forced to take an unfortunate backseat. This is just as well, because the listener’s attention would be wasted on the prominent vocals. The next track, “DVNO”, is a slight improvement on “Tthee Ppaarrttyy”. Despite being another vocal heavy track, Justice moves back into a more traditional electronic style, extensively mixing and cutting the vocals in order to repurpose them as more of an instrument than as a leading component.
Justice finishes up the album by bringing it back to the strong style it started with in the heavy, distorted, and constantly changing tracks “Stress”, “Waters of Nazareth”, and “One Minute to Midnight”. “Stress” does a good job of living up to its name, focusing on high pitched whistles and alarms to the point of discomfort for the listener. My personal favorite of the album, “Waters of Nazareth”, introduces a heavy grinding groove and a high pitched synth, respectively. The two components are then expertly mixed in a powerful section that serves as the climax of the album. Finally, “One Minute to Midnight” closes the album uneventfully with a mellow horn and bass centered sound.
In conclusion, Cross is a must listen for fans of technosonic music. The album is consistently interesting in both its form and sound quality. With Cross, Justice has produced an example of the most cutting edge music that the electronic scene has to offer.
