Justice Wants To Be Your Friends

I don’t know why I waited to hear their respective full-length debut before I wrote about Justice. It’s not like releasing an actual album validates their career or anything. It's pretty impossible to go out to a club and not hear "D.A.N.C.E." or some offshoot of that song. A bunch of Justice singles and remixes have been floating around for a year, including six of the 12 songs on the ridiculously-titled † (yep, a cross symbol pronounced "cross"). And Justice averages about 2-3 blog write-ups a day. Whether or not you know the band, you've probably heard "We Are Your Friends" and the refrain "We! Are! Your Friends! You'll! Never be alone again!" at some place or another. I read a couple of DJs state that it's pretty mandatory to play that song at a gig, whether they want to or not. And you might've heard of Kanye West bumrushing the stage at last year's MTV Europe VMAs after he lost Best Video to "We Are Your Friends," giving Justice something in common with Gretchen Wilson. But one of the consequences of being overly familiar is by the time your career officially kicks off with an actual album, it already feels like a greatest hits collection.

Justice and their labelmates at Ed Banger Records (founded by Pedro Winter of Justice) have been at the forefront of a sub-genre with a ludicrously smarmy name, "blog house," the connotation being that it's dance music made by and for people who sit in front of their computers for hours. That's not entirely true, some of the most fun nights I've had were at blog-sponsored events. At the same time, Justice wouldn't have anywhere close to the amount of buzz without the people who sit in front of their computers for hours downloading new potential club bangers that sound cool because some French blog posted it with pics of hot dancing girls wearing horned-rimmed glasses. There's definitely a groupthink mentality among the blogs, and a lot of DJs get songs from the same places. Out here in LA, almost every night sounds the same, whether it's a Steve Aoki event or some random house party I went to last Saturday. Because it's so easy to obtain tracks, almost anyone can theoretically DJ. Justice simply did a great job using this environment to their full advantage, they have a basic, people-friendly quality. It's like 1997, when dance music like Fat Boy Slim and Chemical Brothers were cool because it kinda sounded like rock music. Even KROQ squeezed them into their playlist. Justice is kinda like that, except on acid.

I heard several comparisons between Justice and LCD Soundsystem, but that's about as lazy as you can get. They're both dance-oriented acts who aren't shy about guitar riffs, but that's about it. If LCD Soundsystem is the Pink Floyd of dance music, then Justice aspires to be nothing more than Black Sabbath. But that's not a bad thing. Songs like "Water of Nazareth," "Phantom," "Let There Be Light" are simple Daft Punk-type songs buried under heavy layers of crunching power chords. They're big, dumb and awesome in it's elemental likeability, and there isn't a whole lot more to say about them. There' s not a whole lot of depth or musical complexity, although they do have a acute sense of shifting tempos and tones before things get too repetitive. A lot of the album tracks that didn't leak stay away from the power chords, but they sould like New-Age fillers. "Valentine" is about as boring as a song can be. "The Party" on the other hand is both boring and annoying; why Ed Banger still force "rapper" Uffie down our throat is beyond my reasoning capabilities.

The one non-headbanger that is up to snuff is of course, "D.A.N.C.E.," a hyper old-skool disco track with a cut-and-paste vocal sample. It's easy to see why it's such a popular dance track, it's catchy as hell and the disco violins are easy to pretty much any ears. I never thought it was a great dance song, it's all build-up and little pay-off, but it's brutally effective as one of those catchy, egalitarian songs that gets everyone involved on the dance floor. It's been played for months now, and it's the official single for †. Which is fine, except I heard "D.A.N.C.E." a gazillion times now.

Download: Justice "D.A.N.C.E."