Justice live!
Justice
Riviera, Chicago
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Somewhere in the midst of Justice’s whirlwind set last Thursday at the Riviera, it became difficult to distinguish exactly what song the electro duo were performing off their 2007 breakthrough album †. Good thing that was hardly the point.
Over the course of an unrelenting and unpredictable performance, the French electro outfit crammed what would’ve taken most bands three hours to perform into an hour and 15 minutes, leaving little time to process the night’s spectacle. As most of † is relatively instrumental, superstars behind the boards (and one flashy light up cross) Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay slid in and out of song snippets, melding the night’s set into one massive medley that changed its mind at every turn. The repeated chorus of Simian single “Never Be Alone” (aka “We! Are! Your friends!”) proved especially persistent throughout the evening’s set.
Unsurprisingly, the night featured a bevy of samples, keeping Augé and de Rosnay busy switching records and twiddling behind mixing boards, themselves no less caught up in the frenzy than anyone in the crowd. What perhaps was surprising was the hard rock edge that, while present on †, comes out in full force during the duo’s live set. Onstage, Justice deliver a wealth of electro-bangers that just got done listening to Nine Inch Nails’ Broken a few too many times, and the result is epic. Nowhere was the marriage of dance and heavy more apparent, and more jarring, than the final moments of the group’s set, setting coy, soft-spoken electro-queen Uffie’s vocals from † track “The Party” over Metallica’s “Master Of Puppets.” It was a move that on paper never should have worked, but seemed the only fitting ending for the evening, given the performance’s tone throughout.
Such a move wasn’t the only brave moment of the night. Only four songs in, the group broke out massive blog-hit “D.A.N.C.E.” changing their minds with regards to the song’s backing track and speed, from a slowed, quiet affair over a piano track to a faster, darker event. No song has better encapsulated the feeling of the current party-kid scene over the last year than “D.A.N.C.E.,” and breaking it in so early showed the duo were hardly there to bend to trends or deliver anything anyone expected.
Just like no one would expect the biggest rock show of 2008 to come from two French artists behind a wall of speakers and a row of turntables and switches. Which just might be why it works so damn well.
— Jaime de’Medici
Category: Live Reviews, Weekly
