Seven years on from exiting the dance music industry, I have rediscovered the joys of thumping fucked up electronic sounds, courtesy of the phenomenal Justice album. For a while there after I stopped being a music journo I couldn’t listen to any music at all, let alone any dance music. Slowly I got back into indie stuff – which I’d been into before I got hooked on repetitive beats (unless you count a much younger hip hop period and subsequent flirtation with cold European electronica like Hard Corps) – but whatever dance music was up to from the year 2000 onwards, I wasn’t listening.
Having said that, the dance ‘industry’ (always an amusing misnomer: none of us were particularly industrious) was dying on its arse by the time I moved on. The heydey of superclubs and hedonism was behind us; techno had hit a dead end; big beat was buggered. The volume of records arriving in the Update/7 office seemed to be increasing, but mining the seam of gold in the vinyl mountain was getting ever tougher. I’ve no idea how things went after that, beyond hearing the rumblings of dance music being dead and learning about friends losing their jobs. But recently I’ve started picking up the odd electronic record here and there; mostly on the indie crossover tip (new rave, for want of a better description).
What marks this new iteration of dance records out from forebearers like Daft Punk is their restlessness: Justice tracks never sit still. Sure, they repeat their hooks, riffs and themes, but always with a new twist, and sometimes shooting off in a completely unexpected direction. Dance records past tended to alight on a hook and milk it for all it was worth, which obviously works in a club context but ultimately limits what you can do. Justice tracks deploy their harsh hooks sparingly or subtly, and limit the use of connective-tissue things like hi-hats, whilst constantly changing up the beats, dropping out the bass, reaching brief crescendos and then deciding to do something else entirely, like a fidgety kid throwing a strop halfway through a game of ‘Guess Who?’ and going off to surf the web instead.
All this will mean fuck all to anybody but me; it’s more a note to myself really, as I nod my head to the twisting, textured, jerking music.
