Bible-dance outfit Justice recently unveiled their long gestating second album, Audio, Video, Disco. It is that record every artist who has romanced the big leagues has had to make: the comeback. You’ve read the hype numerous times before, with hope and hidden fear, headlines proclaiming “the return of your favourite [fill in genre] heroes” and “the second coming.” You may remember The Stone Roses, in a particularly admirable move, even calling their sophomore effort just that. After the five-year wait that followed their eponymous debut, however, The Second Coming couldn’t have proved itself more of a false prophecy. Surrendering their hazy-pop sound in favour of Led Zeppelin-lite blues rock, that album’s legacy stands only to document the death throes of a once great and adored band; one that almost destroyed them.
By all accounts, it is rare nowadays for new artists to offer us a good mystery to unravel; a discovery to explore; a zeitgeist for us to adopt and fight for. Yet 2007's † was arguably such a product. A stunningly immediate record – propulsive, over the top, and era-defining - it also raised a conundrum: How do you top, or even follow, something so unabashedly big? Historically, success has had a strange way of changing how artists relate to their talents, their appeal, and the newfound expectations of them. In the wake of their first album, Pablo Honey, Radiohead virtually drove themselves crazy trying to ensure that their second had the next ‘Creep’ on it. It was only when producer John Leckie persuaded them to road-test some of their new songs with a string of dates did the band have a breakthrough. For that, we were blessed with The Bends. Of course, it’s never always so easy, nor artistically warranted. The graveyard of pop is littered with the corpses of bands struck down by the crippling self-analysis that comes with the pressure to emulate what it was that worked in the first place.
When the Klaxons recently bowed to the pressures of their label to re-record their follow-up with more hits, they were treading a well-worn path indeed. Whereas The Stone Roses were able to milk Geffen’s goodwill for the best part of a decade, the Klaxons have had to deal with a different beast entirely; an industry so in flux it was already in recession before the rest of the economy hit the skids. According to singer and bassist, Jamie Reynolds, Polydor gave the band just over a month to pen something more pop, less “dense” and not so “psychedelic” - in short, not the album they’d made. Inspiration much? Of course, following up any cult-classic can be an onerous task at the best of times. More than once will you come across the words “sell out” in search of an online ‘fan’ consensus of what eventually became Surfing The Void. And the worst of it is, the historical verdict on that album will most likely be offset by the tedious strictures the band faced from their paymasters whilst making it. We should be thankful, then, that Ed Banger is no Polydor; Audio, Video, Disco may have arrived much sooner, but would have sounded far less interesting otherwise...
If you haven’t caught the whole album yet you would have sampled it in the first apéritif, ‘Civilization’, and perhaps more so in the second single and title track. Hear it? That’s the sound of backlash. Yet it’s also the sound of a new direction; of a band trying its utmost not to emulate themselves; a band scratching away at its own veneer. So much nostalgia comes with the passing of four years, and such changes, however great or small, can prove critical for a band’s audience. Not that Justice seem to be paying much attention. Audio, Video, Disco is unmistakably a gambler’s record; purposefully straying from the overly familiar sample-heavy noize that formed much of †'s success for a more laid-back, ‘70s dad rock approach. As such, you’ll struggle to find your next hit of ‘D.A.N.C.E.’ amongst these 11 new tracks. That isn't to say that the Parisian duo have delivered anything less than what you'd expect from them, however. Only now there's a newfound sense of risk that pervades their sound.You only need listen to the first few strains of the operatic, opening volley ‘Horsepower’ for immediate recognition of its cinematic scope; this is an event album, in the old-fashioned sense of the word. And yes, it is truly something to behold.
Artists who stumble in their later work often do so because they have grown into preconceptions and all of its suffocating boundaries. Some just remove themselves entirely from it and offer a curveball so bizarre it seems almost non-canon. Hello MGMT’s Congratulations. Yet for the most part, artists listen to what is said about them and become, for lack of a better term, musically farmed. You can’t condemn them for it; they are human too. It’s just a far cry from what at first may have been some friends mucking around in a studio or bedroom and having fun. Indeed, naivety can be the essence of great art; it can be a skill. There are mistakes in a beginner’s work but these are itself a kind of quality. As it stands, Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay have yet to iron out the creases of their greatness. “We do music in a really naive way,” they told Pitchfork recently, “We're not always fond of well-painted paintings, and [the] same goes with music. We make music without knowing much about the real process of writing or recording, and that makes us do things that are not logical or well-done in a strict technical way.” There is a beautiful irony, you could say naivety, to this considering that arena rock is a démodé genre known for its technical proficiency. The concept of a pastoral daytime record that is also intrinsically electronic is a conceptual underpinning that alone deserves to be commended. Electronica has always been for the night, the cities, the clubs. It's too lazy to critique Justice, as many are doing, of simply delving into the sounds of yore, especially when they are progressing into their own realm with such formidable force as this. Maybe it will be recognised as such by the time they finally get to LP3.
