Leather messiahs

>> With ambiguous religiosity but unequivocally fierce funk, Parisian duo Justice ascend to the throne of new French electro-pop

CROSS CURRENTS: Justice

by JACK OATMON

There were only about 70 people in the musty salon, but every single one of them was going absolutely apeshit, having fallen victim to the hedonistic fever for which Justice are now a certified cult classic. It was at Club Savoy, then serving as the upstairs smoking room for Metropolis on Ste-Catherine, and it was almost exactly two years ago, on Saturday, Oct. 22, 2005, at the MEG Festival. The Parisian prophets of the new school of electro, Gaspard Augé and Xavier De Rosnay, were effectively complete unknowns, not even garnering a single mention in the local media, and the crowd was comprised of passersby and maybe a few particularly sharp blog readers.

Now, back at Metropolis two years later, due to a rapidly sold-out first show, the venue has announced on its Web site that, “in order to better respond to very high demand, Justice will be giving a second performance on October 19, starting at 12:30 a.m. at Metropolis.” That, after having packed Club Soda to the gunnels just seven months ago, leaving scalpers and promoters alike scratching their heads, and a crowd of clubbers in flashy threads begging entry out front, some brandishing “need tickets” signs scrawled on dirty pieces of cardboard.

“The biggest change for us has been in France,” says Augé of their rapid rise to fame. “It’s funny because our singles are being played on some pretty commercial radio stations. So, in France we’ve sort of risen to another level of notoriety, which is cool.”

Baptized with beats

The first flash of recognition the two received was when they entered, and lost, a remix competition for a college radio station in 2003. They composed an entirely original, relentlessly funky synth score for Simon Lord’s wailing vocal, sampled from now-defunct band Simian’s “Never Be Alone.” The track, since retitled “We Are Your Friends,” got them signed to the hideously trendy upstart record label Ed Banger, which is helmed by Daft Punk’s longtime manager, Pedro Winter, aka Busy P. The rest is a story of a million clicks on MP3 blogs and MySpace pages, a perpetually mounting mystique bolstered by a few timely original compositions and a versatile catalogue of remixes for anyone from tiny footnotes like French dance-punk outfit Scenario Rock all the way up to bloated icons like Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake.

“We started doing this four years ago,” says Augé, “but in France, people have really started to get interested in us since the album came out and we started performing live shows.”

The development of a live arrangement is a tactic being increasingly employed by dance music producers, as the crossover appeal of acts like Justice draws more and more rock and live-music fans onto sweat-soaked dancefloors. For their own performance, Augé and de Rosnay have recently gone from DJing their music on turntables to a fully live show.

“We actually had to have a large synthesizer constructed in Los Angeles. We control it with our laptops and keyboards. So we’ve had to remake more simplified versions of the pieces in order to be able to perform them in the live setting. We’ve also got a few other machines and keyboards for adding sounds to the tracks.”

The creation of a customized vehicle of performance can only serve to add to their unique sound and image, using what amounts to an electronic church organ to complement the crucifix and dark apostles at the altar of the nightclub.

“Essentially, it’s just us two, a huge synthesizer and a cross,” says Augé of their presence onstage.

Judeo-Christian juxtaposition

But the Christian image that is heavily insinuated by Justice’s peculiar aesthetic is something that lies as much in the popular perception of their art as it does in their own vision. Justice self-classify as “Christian/club” on their MySpace page, but there’s an intentional ambiguity, or possibly a paradox, there. The duo’s moral leanings remain unclear even in their admission of their religion.

“Yes, we are actually Christian,” the thoughtful Augé carefully reveals. “But the cross that we use is something that we prefer to let people interpret in whatever way they want. Because that way it’s more stimulating to the imagination than things that are explicitly explained, like saying, ‘Okay, we’re Christians, gotta go to church,’ or whatever. That’s not what we’re trying to do. We find it far more interesting to allow people to create their own version of the image.”

The ostensibly Christian demeanour certainly lies in stark contrast to the general behaviour witnessed at the events at which Justice perform. The music too is somewhat at odds with the supposed austerity of Christianity. The two have conjured up an unmistakable style of composition that pits hedonistic, sanguine melodies and catchy riffs up against ominous organs, punctuated with mutilated samples and unnervingly sincere pop choruses. It all culminates in their first full-length, belligerently entitled †.

The album starts off like a classical symphony performing a madman’s vision of pop. It then plummets into the cranium-slamming depths of electro-house, at times strongly evoking Wendy Carlos’s schizophrenic synth vision of A Clockwork Orange, while at others landing closer to Michael Jackson and Daft Punk. But it always maintains the group’s self-described “violent” edge that was properly baptized by their first original release, “Waters of Nazareth.”

“We do everything between the two of us,” says Augé of the songwriting process. “We always discuss what we want to do first, then once we know exactly what it is we want to accomplish and what direction we’re going, we start writing the piece in a pretty traditional manner, with a piano or a bass. Then we construct the piece around this classical ballad that we’ve written, while trying to replace the melodic elements of it in our own style. When we write a song we start somewhere with a single note and end with up a story.”

Kanye converted

Another thing Justice have in common with some of their between-genre peers is that they’re making music in a medium that isn’t necessarily representative of their tastes. With groups like Belgium’s Soulwax chiselling techno out of a long history of alternative rock and New Yorker James Murphy’s various musical projects springing forth from relatively ironic origins, it’s not that much of a surprise that the electronic dance music that many kids dig is coming from elsewhere than the electronic music scene.

“We don’t really have a background in electronic music. We listen to a great deal of pop and not much electronic music, so that probably explains the accessibility of it. The structures of the tunes are very pop.”

The surprising accessibility of their style has also garnered them their share of industry attention, in the form of several award nominations. When I last spoke to Augé early in 2007, he recounted a story of American rapper Kanye West’s onstage temper tantrum at having lost to Justice’s video for “We Are Your Friends” at the MTV Europe Music Awards.

At that time, Justice was on tour, so Ed Banger’s in-house graphic designer So_Me accepted the award in their place, unaware of what the chance encounter with West would lead to. This year, the video for their latest single, “D.A.N.C.E.”, also directed by So_Me, is up for that same award. When I asked who would be the offended party at this year’s ceremony, Augé responded, “The funny thing about it is that our graphic designer So_Me has just finished producing Kanye West’s new clip! So it seems that buckle has been buckled.”

With Midnight Juggernauts at Metropolis on
Friday, Oct. 19, 9 p.m. (sold out) and with
busy p at midnight ($25), all ages