Justice

What a weird record this is.

Isn’t Audio, Video, Disco supposed to be one of those ear-candy French house deals? What’s with the prog-rock? Was “On’n’On” ghostwritten by Robert Plant? There’s a lot that jumps out on first listen, but all of it generally suggests the same thing: what a weird, weird record.

Justice is now four years removed from career-making debut Cross, and the layoff is apparent. That album was an unrepentant dance record: like reducing Daft Punk’s Discovery down to its climactic core, and running the result through enough overdrive to burn through your eardrums. Justice assimilated a rock influence in much the same way that Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter had—mainly, by turning up the flanger on their guitars and playing arena-sized live shows. Cross was never cerebral or innovative—far from it—but it was firmly and fruitfully committed to destroying dance floors.

Audio, Video, Disco’s intentions are less clear. More than anything else, Gaspard Auge and Xavier de Rosnay are channeling the canons of classic and progressive rock. On a generic level, they’re operating pretty far from their provenance. They concede as much, sonically, by leaning on late ‘80s house signifiers—the same squelching synths and hearbeat kicks as Cross. Structurally, though, the tracks on Audio, Video, Disco almost universally reach back even farther. The aforementioned “Kashmir”-influenced “On’n’On” aside, the freewheeling guitar solo and distorted kick-kick-handclap rhythm on “Parade” are straight out of the Queen playbook. And this is likely the first and only Ed Banger release to count Pete Townshend as a foundational influence: Auge and de Rosnay lift the counter-melodic keyboards on “Civilization” and the delay-heavy guitar riff of “New Lands” from “Baba O’Riley” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” respectively, and the Stonehenge-cross cover art comes directly from Who’s Next.

In revisiting ’70s classic rock, Auge and de Rosnay are treading on blatantly unfashionable ground—distinct from the polyester New Wave that influences so many of their contemporaries in that it has not yet undergone a post-ironic, legitimizing reinvention. Given their album-length devotion to the subject material, you hardly get the sense that Justice are f*****g around with hipster-baiting genre exercises, but you have to wonder where Audio, Video, Disco came from. It’s not a flattering concept; Justice don’t do compositional nuance—it was never all that essential for the nu-disco club tracks of Cross—and it shows when down-tempo cuts like “Ohio” and the Ratatat-esque “Brianvision” get stuck in the mud.

Justice deserve some credit for a truly ingenious concept—filtering stadium-sized rock songs through a French house filter—and less so for the ham-handed execution. Unsurprisingly, the two best songs here, “Helix” and the title track, hem far closer to vocoder disco and propulsive house than anything else on the album. We already knew that Justice have the chops to make a great party record. Where they go from here is an open question, and given the out-of-left-field Audio, Video, Disco, why bother to speculate?