Vice Records
2007
+ (Cross)
About This Album
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 Off the Wall slap-popping bass. Scattered and chopped to all hell, the songs 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 with the sudden snapback of 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.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,9 and 10)

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