Rating:
Genre:
Electronica
Release Date: 07/10/2007
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
R&B, and
lounge with
Clockwork Orange synths, deadly static crunches, hard-hitting kicks, grinding groans, and a spliced slap-popping 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 latter-day
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 pops in-between 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 double-dutch flavor, and
"Ththhee Ppaarrttyy" incorporates a cute-voiced 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 tension-building
Space Invaders type bassline, and
"Waters of Nazareth" combines a crunchy church organ with a bottom-heavy synthesizer rolling in gravel. Admirably random samples dug up from underground sources like '70s Italian
prog-rockers
Goblin, combined with a reckless abandon and an adherence to melodic hooks, makes
Cross one of the most interesting
electro-crossovers since
Ratatat, and the guys in
Justice do an excellent job building on
Daft Punk's innovative foundation.
~Jason Lymangrover, All Music Guide
Cart 0 items
Listen
