Released: 2007
Opera disco? Come again? Daft Punk had re-written all the rules about what was cool and what went with what, a la chefs with a menu of dance music “stuff” from which they had the right to blend anything with anything. Then along came Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Auge, fellow Frenchman with a similarly irreverent attitude towards backwards engineering.
As Justice the pair’s debut album Cross owed more to punk rock than the glossy, White Island audio tropes that were filling endless ambition free compilations. Sampling with a freedom and intensity not seen since The Avalanches Since I Left You, along the way they made club music suffused with a kind of anarchy that made it hugely unpredictable and most of all, fun.
Cross opened up with the funky, elastic limbed Genesis, on which the duo had DJ booth stalkers everywhere diving for cover by snipping from the likes of Pharoahe Monch, 50 Cent, Devo, Prince, Slipknot and even goddamn Queen. Whilst dancing until they dropped people asked, was it house music, or something else? The truth was that it was just music, but a place where Justice’s house rules ruled.
The Voice Of Unreason 