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Justice

Waters Of Nazareth

(Vice Recordings; US: 6 Jun 2006; UK: 6 Jun 2006)

‘Heavy metal disco’ may be a label that causes switch-off but wait a minute, this is the same Justice from Justice vs. Simian’s “Never Be Alone”—yes, even three years after it was released, still THE song of the summer, I know. But this is what happens when you take hard electro one step further—actually it’s so gritty it tastes delicious. The title track, “Waters of Nazareth” is full of organ melody, slightly fuzzed out on the low end, and then undercut by a crunching, heavily distorted bass; and sure, it’s no “Never Be Alone”, but enough to ignite a dancefloor in 2006, surely. Two re-edits of the main track, one by the group and one by alt-DJ du jour Erol Alkan, don’t really add much to the original concept here, just re-twist the order or intensity of the crunchy distortion: you only need to hear these if you’re likely to obsess about which different version you heard last Saturday night at that trendy LES bar. But the EP hides another small discovery: “Let There Be Light” is labeled as a “demo” (what that means for a dance track I’m not exactly sure); the outlook’s constant, dirty above all, but towards the end it all cuts out for a while and we bask in a soft-synth-fueled euphoria-trip, before starting it all up again. A great headphone dance track. Look out for the long player, when it drops: sure to set the downtown scene atwitter.

Rating:

Dan Raper has been writing about music for PopMatters since 2005. Prior to that he did the same thing for his college newspaper and for his school newspaper before that. Of course he also writes fiction, though his only published work is entitled "Gamma-secretase exists on the plasma membrane as an intact complex that accepts substrates and effects intramembrane cleavage". He is currently studying medicine at the University of Sydney, Australia.


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