House Is A Feeling

Good old Jess Harvell reviews Justice for Pitchfork. Possibly the best thing about this review is someone on the ILM thread assuming Jess was a girl and acting accordingly (way down the bottom on June 12th). In the context of a review that says “the riffs on tracks like ‘Let There Be Light’ and ‘Stress’ practically cock-slap you in the face” this is made even funnier.

Let’s be fair, perhaps it’s just as weird for a guy to be talking about getting cock slapped in the face as a girl, but I grew up in a Catholic country so I can’t help you there!

As for the review, well my feelings on Justice are simple: I don’t like them! It’s funny because I’ve always been hugely into French dance music. The old Alan Braxe/Fred Falke/Bangalter/Falcon stuff is pretty much sacrosanct pop genius for me, I just haven’t really been able to get on board with the rock thing that’s been going on in recent months or years.

My problem, as hashed out too many times now, is basically that I think the dance/rock thing was done in a very similar, but more interesting way, 3 or 4 years ago, and now the residual acts from that scene are making LPs, well, the ones that haven’t decamped to minimal. And you know most music journalists are too fucking ignorant/lazy to pay any attention to dance trends until they get sent an album, ie 2 years after it’s over.

When I hear Justice or CSS, I feel the same way as I do when I turn on the TV and Coke ads like this one or the new one with a cover of “Lola” in it come on. It’s called “Vivas as Differencas”.

I’ll let you decide if there are similarities of aesthetic there, or if you care. But it does bother me that people treat eclecticism like it’s an ideology, especially when the most fertile ground for this attitude is marketing, promoting, and advertising.

Anyway, one of the other notable things about Jess’s review is that, unlike 99 per cent of discourse about Justice in major media outlets, it actually acknowledges that the record didn’t just come straight from a promo brown envelope into existence.

And that some people actually care about the impact records like this have on techno, and will care in 6 months time, or a few years time. As for the rift between house and techno and whatever we call Justice and friends, as much as it’s nice that Jess attempts to reunite the tribes, I can’t see that diminishing too soon.