Justice - † Pretentious symbol = french dance?

This is much better than I expected it to be!

it was better than i expected it to be too, there was a good song which wasn't 'waters of nazareth'

but still very very shit generally

was it d.a.n.c.e.?

considering you get down to like slint or whatever i cant imagine youre hating on this for being too corny hipster whatever

no it was 'stress'. i don't know who/what slint are/is

i cant imagine youre hating on this for being too corny hipster whatever

it's half that half abrasiveness+ADD-dance syndrome i think

slint or squeeze or smash or smog or whatever

Ethan there is a fine art to calling The Lex out on his indie band faves and you are frankly rubbish at it, even Passantino is better than you.

As far as the blog house canon goes right now - Black Strobe > Simian Mobile Disco > Justice > Digitalism BUT the much-maligned MSTRKFT album from last year might be better than all of them.

'Stress' is awesome but it does kind of add credence to Justice's whole "we make music without really knowing how to" schtick because if they DID know how to do it they would have made the beat 1000 times more slamming than it actually is. As it happens, they end up with a pretty flaccid 'tic' noise.

i disagree completely w/ that list

justice > blackstrobe >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> simian + digitalism

'blog house' as a term is going to keep pissing me off for the rest of the year probably. i'll just call it blog dance perhaps.

Well at least you've given up on 'haircut electro'.

true heads will never give up on haircut electro.

i haven't given up on it! it's still a more accurate term for much of this stuff.

i gotta say jess and other folks being into this doesn't surprise me really, seems like its what people had been hoping rock music would do, incorporating dance and electronic-ness and fun and relative populism and all that (although this might be contradicted by vahid's 'this is real dance' thing). i havent really listened beyond the singles but i don't really get out of this what i like about dance music so i donno, maybe i need to listen to the album and its like the dance ac/dc or something but for right now i'm happy letting this stuff blow by w/out jumping on board.

i dont mean to argue the 'not real dance' perspective ... i think thats kind of a silly argument and i'm in favor of all the things justice represent w/out actually enjoying the singles i've heard, or something

it's like, i'll dance to this stuff when i hear it out, but that's more because i have v. limited going-out options here and it's better than not dancing if i'm in the dancing mood. but i can't be bothered to seek it out on my own, it just doesn't do for me what i like dance music to do

i gotta say jess and other folks being into this doesn't surprise me really, seems like its what people had been hoping rock music would do, incorporating dance and electronic-ness and fun and relative populism and all that

you got that backward there, chief

uhm, i must say that i think 'D.A.N.C.E.' might be one of the most annoying things i've heard in ages. fuck this shite.

in more ways than one, i'm glad i dismissed this stuff as garbage before hearing it for so long. because it proves that i was right the whole time.

that and uffie is terrible.

cosigned

justice > blackstrobe >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> simian + digitalism

(most stuff in the world) >>>> simian md > justice > black strobe > digitalism

black strobe lose points because i am being deluged with multiple copies of their album

the one song in this vein i really properly love is jojo de freq's 'saturn returns'. bleep! bleep!

yeah, i DEFINITELY vote for Simian Mobile Disco over Justice, tho that would be a 'lesser of two evils' vote.

Just be thankful you guys don't have BangGang and their associated acts. Melbourne really is the worst place in the world for this stuff - whether it's commercial-haircut or indie-haircut it's just worse than everywhere else.

I just had to review a single by a guy called Muscles with a song called "One Inch Badge Pin" (as in "Drive a one inch badge pin through my heart") sung as if the only two songs ever made were "Open Up" and "House of Jealous Lovers" over the top of what the press-release describes as "soft trance synths and O.T.T. lo-fi house tunes", which is part of BangGang's chosen genre of "futurustic indie dance house gabba gabba hardcore music".

The first line of the song is: “Last night I met a girl who said she had connections in the Melbourne independent music industry…”

link!

Bang Gang

yeah tim, that looks quite terrible. i mean, reallly really bad.

"dj buttf*ck aka gus da hoodrat"

i don't really understand the issue with justice. is this perhaps related to not understanding the appeal of mylo??

Vahid do you mean you not understanding the appeal of mylo, or others not understanding the appeal of mylo?

I was listening to the 2nd Anniversay Get Physical mix again the other day, specifically "Our World (Our Music)" and thinking "this song is just perfect". Or more, it felt like the reconciliation of lots of different impulses, the deep house atmospherics, the electro-house insistent bassline, the strings... It's like the dance track that plays at the very end of the universe. It's positively utopian.

There was a very reconciliatory perfectionism to a lot of electro-house circa 2004 - even or perhaps especially "Drop The Pressure", which in a certain sense is perfect, there's nothing about that tune that could be changed to enhance what it is (you might dislike what it is, but that's a separate issue).

Justice etc. stuff never aspires to this, there's always a sense in which the music wishes to remain unreconciled and imperfect, and in a more blocky and obvious way than the delicate dialectical negotiations i tend to over-diagnose in almost all music I like. It's like they saw Herbert's Let's All Make Mistakes and invented a sub-genre based on the title rather than the music house therein. This refusal to move towards perfection can be appealing not just in terms of post-indie anti-professionalism, but also dance music notions of rawness, anti-slickness. I can well imagine people who disliked electro-house on account of a perceived slickness embracing this stuff because it goes to such lengths to avoid this attribute. On the other hand, at times it feels like this music never pursues anti-professionalism as an end in itself (you could make an argument for Switch etc. at this point) but always a means to some other end, which is a kind of meta-narrative comment on what it means to be making/listening to/dancing to dance music. Hence this sort of bipolar swing from self-consciously embracing dance signifiers ("D.A.N.C.E.", "It's The Beat") and establishing a distance from them ("Last night I met a girl who said she had connections in the Melbourne independent music industry…”). When Switch call tunes "Get On Downz" or "This Is Sick" there's a similar self-consciousness, but it's not conflicted at all - it's more emphatic and polemic than that.

I'm not implying qualitative judgments w/r/t electro-house, Justice, Switch etc. above. I'm just trying to think through potential different logics at work.

tim i am fasting right now and can't really think all the way through what you're saying. also i don't think that justice sounds like some sort of anti-accomplished sound. it sounds just as "well-tempered" as anything else, especially in contrast to digitalism or SMD or "human after all".

what i meant earlier is that maybe i don't understand LDN-ILM's rejection of justice because i didn't understand their championing stuff like mylo or headman ...

I don't mean Justice specifically so much as the entire scnee of which they are a part. The Justice I have heard seems to swing very quickly between noise and shine.

scene, obv.

I feel quite safe in saying: YALL R GAY

Tim Finney, myself, and The Lex will not tolerate your hate speech on ILM. We have not and will not charge you a cent and you're free to take your business elsewhere. I'd rather not call the police, but if you insist on continuing to disturb our guests I will. Please leave.

muscles is a former (very minor) ilx troll.

No way!!!

ILM needs to get out more.

The ribbing of Justice here is pretty mild.

Plus I think it's worth considering that Mylo and Headman had their biggest hits in 2004. That's three years ago so to expect some sort of consistency between people who liked them, then, when you could expect to hear Mylo in the middle of Tiefschwarz, the Knife, the Rapture etc (and this was a genuinely new and interesting DJing style), to like Justice now seems a little off to me.

Not least because, Justice sound nothing like Mylo or Headman. Plus it's obvious why people don't like Justice, if you look at what the people disliking them are listening to now.

That plus, if you lived in Europe Vahid you'd understand! (or Melbourne seemingly!)

"it's obvious why people don't like Justice, if you look at what the people disliking them are listening to now"

it's really not obvious to me

I don't get out enough to actually hear this kind of music in the specific clubs/at parties you would hear it at. I'm LDN-ILM (ha, separate board?) but don't reject them (I like them about as much as Mylo).

i like em more than i liked Mylo, who i thought was mostly meh.

"ILM needs to get out more."

Spencer I don't think you'd like the Muscles track. Although (what I think is) the Bag Raiders remix is quite good. Sometimes this stuff gets emotional and straightforward in a manner reminiscent of Cosmos's "Take Me With You", which i can't help but be sympathic towards.

tim he was calling himself "idle idle", i would search for stuff but the search sucks now. he liked the last sean paul album!

what was headman's hit??

"birth school work death"?

The Headman DJ mix on Eskimo was pretty good! I discovered Ed Laliq's "Drowning" and New Fast Automatic Daffodils by listening to it.

I have vague recollections of idle idle. A quick google search reveals he was also underwhelmed by Lindstrom & Prins Thomas.

He's not a bad musician actually (the production is occasionally good-winsome) but the song is intolerable.

Mylo was fucking awful and had street teamers spray-painting up half of Glasgow with his bullshit. Teuchter fuck.

the first time Muscles posted on ILM was a "listen to this remix I just made" - three people said "your home-computer glitching of this pop song is not especially good", and he erupted in a flurry of "I just made it last night in three hours and I'm over it now maaaan, don't pin me down with your preconceptions." Later he posted on a thread to say "People still listen to techno?"

It was kind of an in-between stage in his career, following trolling M&N hard for years about seducing his parents' maid, and before touring the US supporting Soulwax.

1" Badge Pin got a fluxblog blowjob about a year ago, too.

It was kind of an in-between stage in his career, following trolling M&N hard for years about seducing his parents' maid, and before touring the US supporting Soulwax.