Over the past 20 years, French EDM has gone from a hipster specialism to full-blown mainstream concern. But while Grammy awards, Hollywood soundtracks and festival headline slots may have blunted the genre's inherent edginess, producers like Daft Punk and DJ Snake have managed to maintain a high degree of integrity while collaborating with a host of blue-chip artists on mind-bogglingly popular tunes.
Justice are doing it another way, namely by reining in the collabs and focusing on diversifying and honing their sound. And while they are now operating with a degree of ingenuity and creative distinction that safely places them beyond the constraints of dance music, it is the dance tunes that form the backbone of their third album, ‘Woman’.
Safe and Sound and Fire are sexy, swaggering cuts that arrive heavily loaded with diaphanous disco flourishes and elegant falsetto melodies, while Pleasure and Randy show off the duo’s talent for funk arrangement; a key asset of their previous album: 2011’s ‘Audio, Video, Disco’.
But it’s not all good. Alakazam ! and Heavy Metal may inspire elation in a nightclub, but here they feel overlong and sterile. It’s like the duo felt they needed to ape music that brought them to mainstream attention on 2008’s ‘†’, and entered into the task with limited enthusiasm.
There’s also a problem with the gentler cuts. Stop and Love S.O.S. are very well written songs but Justice’s sound is so achingly hip - so insouciant and post-ironic - that when it is slowed down, a track that felt edgy becomes undemanding and middle of the road. At times, music arranged with great brio reads as easy listening, Ibiza lounge dreck.
The standout track here might well be Chorus, which starts out like the soundtrack to a racing video game and takes us on a voyage in space and time, arriving on a distant planet where giant theremins do battle with musical motorbikes and extra terrestrial choirs. It’s prog EDM: Jean-Michel Jarre meets Elon Musk.
From a production and arrangement perspective, there is very little to fault with ‘Woman’, but there is a emotional depth lacking here. The album is like a Monégasque friend who swaggers aboard the boat in white chinos, orders a bottle of champagne and charms everyone. Then he leaves and you never see him again. And you don't care.
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