Truth be told, I’m not a big EDM fan, generally preferring the “real music trinity” of pop music: real musicians playing real instruments in real, non-digitized time. But an occasional good hearty dose of beat-pummeling electronica, when done right, can get my juices going and my senses working overtime (to borrow a phrase from XTC).
The French duo known as Justice filled that bill at the Santa Barbara Bowl last Friday, with electro-gusto and hyper-psychedelic choreographed lights to spare. Thumping grooves, teasing hooklets, sonic debris and tailor-made intense light dance moves kept the sold-out crowd writhing and entranced for the duration. Even this skeptic was hypnotized, lured into submission to the beat and the visual whizbang of the night.
In fact, the visual element of Justice’s show was so potent and critical that the sharp-dressed musician known as The Dare’s otherwise strong one-hour opening set — in broad daylight — felt anemic by comparison. The Dare kicked off his set with a “local” artist, former Santa Barbara County resident Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ‘til You Get Enough,” before branching off into sonic whereabouts unknown, to a lockstep beat.
Justice, being Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay, is no babe in the electro woods, having scored a career-launching hit in 2007 with the album Cross, and have used cross symbology ever since — sans religious affiliations. The sound was like Daft Punk but original, and the visceral power of the music retains its power all these years later. Earlier this year, their album Hyperdrama yielded a Best Electronic/Dance Recording Grammy for a collaboration with Tame Impala, “Neverender,” which we heard both in full form and in folded-in reprise modes at the Bowl.
Last week’s show opened mysteriously, with a bed of drones building up from a slow pulse to the dramatic entrance of the thudding backbeat that rarely quit for the entire set, a modular medley of pieces rather than a setlist, as such. Visuals mattered, symbiotically, with the sound factor. An elaborate and mobile lighting rig dominated the stage, producing angular blades and kaleidoscopic patterns of synchronized lighting. At one point, a dramatic arabesque of rectangles hovered over and around the duo, on moving armatures.
Justice performs at the Santa Barbara Bowl | Credit: Ingrid Bostrom 
Justice & The Dare | Credit: Ingrid Bostrom 
Justice performs at the Santa Barbara Bowl | Credit: Ingrid Bostrom 
Justice & The Dare | Credit: Ingrid Bostrom 
Justice performs at the Santa Barbara Bowl | Credit: Ingrid Bostrom 
Justice & The Dare | Credit: Ingrid Bostrom 
Justice & The Dare | Credit: Ingrid Bostrom 
Justice & The Dare | Credit: Ingrid Bostrom 
Justice & The Dare | Credit: Ingrid Bostrom 
Justice & The Dare | Credit: Ingrid Bostrom 
Justice & The Dare | Credit: Ingrid Bostrom 
Justice & The Dare | Credit: Ingrid Bostrom 
The Dare performs at the Santa Barbara Bowl| Credit: Ingrid Bostrom 
Justice & The Dare | Credit: Ingrid Bostrom 
The Dare performs at the Santa Barbara Bowl| Credit: Ingrid Bostrom
Among the more hypnotic hooks in the Justic repertoire is their remix of Simian’s “Never Be Alone” and rebranded as “We Are Your Friends” in the Justice version. On record, the mantra-like refrain, “We are your friends, you’ll never be alone again” repeats in epic, mesmeric fashion. At the Bowl, the duo called up shorter versions of the song twice, once early and one late.
The lyric’s insistent sentiment, with its robotic repetition, strikes one as a combination of comforting ode to human solidarity and a slyly ironic statement, reminiscent of the line in Mars Attacks! when a Martian landing on Earth tells the fretful humanoid crowd, “Don’t run; we are your friends,” just before unleashing their murderous Martian terror on the hapless Earthlings.
But such dark notions were only occasional intrusions on the sternum-shaking, highwire sensory massage of Justice’s show. Once you give in to the pounding pulse and visual rat-tat-tat machine, there can be a sense of engaging with a collective throbbing, wiggling humanity in motion. It can even be compared to religious ecstasy or what, at the recent Yo-Yo Ma concert/conference at the Arlington, author Samin Nosrat (Salt Fat Acid Heat) called “collective effervescence.”
Perhaps that’s another, loftier way of describing the feeling of a mass of people getting into the groove, maybe at first reluctantly but ultimately with neighborly abandon.
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