Justice: "We're just trying to keep it raw and minimal"

Philosopher and semiologist Roland Barthes would find no little satisfaction in seeing fellow Frenchmen Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Auge championing the spectacular. He might not have felt the same if he had been a music journalist. The recent critical consensus towards their second album saw the words 'style over substance' levelled at the duo, a condemnation sure to send your average Smiths fan harrumphing about the place.

On the face of it, the accusation holds some currency: the nonchalant appropriation of Christian iconography, the Francophile Strokes look, and even the label to which they belong, Ed Banger (itself perenially cited as an HQ for vacuity), have aroused suspicion of insincerity. But it is perhaps because of this dedication to aesthetics that Justice have found such an enthusiastic audience, and it's hard to escape the feeling that such criticisms give too little credit to the substance of style.

Barthes once wrote of wrestling as "not a sport, but a spectacle... the public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not... what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees," and the same seems especially true of Justice. If anything, the shift from the hydra-headed house and disco of 2007's † (let's just call it Cross) to the chest-out prog rock found on their new album Audio, Video, Disco better befits their fondness for the theatrical. That said, Auge, on the other end of a phoneline from Paris, explains that this principle derives from a 'less is more' aesthetic where their new live show is concerned.

"The main difference between the two albums, I guess, is just the matter of production, but the backbone is still the same. It's always between epicness and melancholia. We kept a few things from the previous tour, we got rid of some other stuff, but it's still very minimal in terms of colours or lasers or videos. It's still very kind of Phantom of the Opera. We are using new technologies but we are not trying to use everything we can do with it. It's still used in a very minimal way. 

"We definitely have a kind of theatrical approach when it comes to doing live shows, just because we feel that the proper electronic or techno aesthetic doesn't really feed our music. We don't really like the techno DJ aesthetic. [when pressed to elaborate, Auge begins to describe a 'huge video with some clown or faces or something'] We're just trying to keep it raw and minimal."

This disinclination extends to Audio, Video, Disco too. The album sheds the muscular club aesthetic of its predecessor, taking the self-consciously epic centre of Cross and transposing the same feeling onto a quasi-mythical, prog rock template; more Yes than Yazoo. Auge concedes that this change of direction wasn't to everyone's taste. 

"Today it seems everything has to have a proper tag and a name – maybe it's always been like that. We felt a bit annoyed because some people were disappointed that it wasn't electro or whatever, but we never claimed that we were doing electro. We were just doing music in the wide sense of the term... as long as the music is touching us, it's always a good influence to take. We are just trying to make music that provides a very simple emotion. That's what music is about, making people happy or sad, or wanting to punch someone in the face."

In several interviews, Auge and De Rosnay freely confess to a lack of skill as producers or musicians; surely, two albums in, you would be less inclined to be so self-effacing.

"When we say we are not like trained musicians, it is in the sense that we don't have any classical knowledge of music because we can't read music. We tried to learn more about harmonies and stuff, but in the end we just quit because it was losing too much of the magic, y'know, to know how things work in a very mathematical way. Music [being like mathematics] is really depressing. We want to keep the excitement of finding two notes that go well together.

"We are trying to be as sincere and naive as possible, just because this is the kind of music we like. I guess we have a very naïve and romantic vision of music, for example some bands like ELO, they were very... I don't know the word in English... it's fleur bleue. It's almost like music made by a virgin teenager, and we want to keep a bit of virginity."

The words escape his mouth with a barely-suppressed giggle, but the allusion to innocence does ring true of what the duo refer to as their 'countryside' album; the idea being to remove electronic music from a club context; to give it some fresh air, so to speak. Ohio's soaring vocals and Love-esque arpeggios lend it a striking sense of purity, and the euphoric title track that closes the album is similarly affecting. It is Brianvision, however, dressed with a sulky Flash Gordon riff and little else, that Auge says is the album's centrepiece.

"When we did Brianvision we felt that the sound encapsulated the whole idea of the record sound-wise. It's very roomy... it's laid back but still powerful. We wanted to have some air around the music. It's something that is contrary to electronic music because it's made with a computer. We tried to put some air in the circuits."

Before wrapping up, Auge touches on Justice's 2008 tour documentary, Across The Universe. As well as cataloguing the expected littany of 'what goes on tour stays on tour' moments (eg. marrying a complete stranger in Las Vegas, bottling folk in car parks), it also gives pause to the thought that, upon being received by thousands of garrulous Scots tossing beer and piss in their direction at RockNess festival this year, it might not only be Americans who come off as a bit foreign.

"It's always a bit crazy in Scotland which is why we love to go there, because people are really going for it, and it's the best thing you can ask from an audience, to be enthusiastic. We love, when we go to Scotland, to eat haggis [which Auge pronounces 'ha-geese' in a lilting French accent], we are huge fans of haggis. The last time we were there we bought some and ate it on the bus, just with the microwave. It was really good." 

The Skinny begins to volunteer information on an eaterie in Scotland that does some pretty exotic things with haggis. Auge half-heartedly contemplates the idea. "We're really into the old-fashioned haggis, like no fancy stuff around it – just plain old haggis."