Justin Bieber's Justice injustice

Here's the Justin / Justice story. The cover art for Justin Bieber's new album Justice appears to have ripped off the logo of the French house band Justice. A big cross for a T is the clue: this was very much Justice's thing, particularly on their cross-emblazoned debut album.

In itself, this isn't that incriminatory. In a past life I worked for a Christian bookshop and people plastered crosses on everything. They turned Ts into crosses, Xs into crosses, laugh-cry emojis into crosses. Maybe not that last one. It's a pretty route-one design technique, like turning Ss into snakes or turning As into anarchy symbols.

However, there's a paper trail (and no, we don't mean this joke doodle from Justice's record company). We all know from cop shows that paper trails are bad. Apparently one of Bieber's people wrote to Justice's people, according to an email seen by Rolling Stone (the magazine, not the wrinkled rockers). No-one got back to the Bieber peeps, so they pressed ahead anyway, but now Justice's people are cross (geddit?!) and have issued a cease-and-desist letter. The war is on.

Bieber also used audio of Martin Luther King on the album, for which he received permission. This is, of course, problematic in a different way. It's good that a famous white man is introducing black history to his fans, many of whom may never have been exposed to this stuff before. But it's also dodgy that a famous white man is appropriating stuff like this to sell records, especially when there are current black voices being silenced. This is, of course, from the same bloke who said Anne Frank would have been a belieber. It's all a bit icky.

It also seems that the justice theme is pretty perfunctory. There's the Justin / Justice wordplay. Yep, I get that. Then there's the MLK samples, including the line "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." But according to Buzzfeed, that's it. Hold On is about holding hands with his girl. Holy is about having a nice hug with his girl. Lonely is about the isolation of fame, probably while playing pat-a-cake with his girl. This is not an album about justice: it's just a selection of his usual watery pop guff.

Let's think about that for a moment. Someone came up with the Justice title because it sounds a bit like Justin. They made an apparently half-arsed attempt to get permission to use Justice's cross logo, then used it anyway. And then they dumped some MLK speeches about justice into an album that is otherwise nothing to do with justice. 

That's like setting up a lemonade stall dressed as a lemon, with a whole range of home-made lemonades laid out neatly on a a table-cloth displaying a lovely tapestry of carefully illustrated lemons, with little handmade paper lanterns in the shape of lemons, then stealing someone's overweight poodle and calling the stall Look At This Massive Poodle. 

Just stick to the lemons, Justin. The unnecessarily purloined stuff is just complicating things. It's a distraction and it's getting you into trouble.

I guess what I'm trying to say is if this ends up with a load of overblown proggy Justice remixes of Justin Bieber songs, I'm moving to Mars and never coming back. Now excuse me while I edit this blog post to ensure every small-case m looks like a pair of testicles.

Best electronica albums of 2011: numbers 4 to 2

We are approaching the Album Of The Year much in the same way an astronaut with an upside-down map is heading for the sun. By the time you finish reading this blog post, you should be in a position to try and guess the winner of this year’s top accolade.

Meanwhile, let’s check out the nearly gang in our penultimate collection of also-rans. Once that's done, we'll crank up the Top Of The Bleeps theme music with numbers 4 to 2.

[This is part three. Click here for part one. Click here for part two. Click here for part four.]

Some also-rans

I’m very sad to exclude Björk, especially after her triumphant performance of the Attenborough-tastic Biophilia (One Little Indian). She had a Tesla coil for crap’s sake. However, although she is on top of her game right now, it’s not really electronica of the Fat Roland On Electronica variety.

At the very bottom of their game is Paris’s own Justice, whose new album Audio, Video, Disco (Ed Banger) was such a mess, I wasn’t sure if Spinal Tap were having a seizure: at first amusing then just painful and sad. Imagine The Who teaming up with David Guetta. No, it wouldn’t be fantastic, you’re wrong. In 2011, Justice made me cross.

Mark Pritchard and Steve Spacek’s Africa HiTech project was a joy to the ears: 93 Million Miles (Warp) was bristling with bass and bad attitude – but not a top ten spot. Also not in the top ten is Biosphere, whose nuclear-themed concept album N-Plants (Touch) was gorgeous and just okay at the same time, while SBTRKT’s SBTRKT (Young Turks) was filed along with Nero in the grey bin next to my desk marked ‘pop’.

4 - Modeselektor - Monkeytown

In 1998, Thom Yorke threw a rabbit into the headlights and set the standard for guest vocalists on Unkle’s debut Psyence Fiction. It’s remarkable then that he should return all these years later and equal that achievement on Modeselektor’s third album Monkeytown (Monkeytown). It’s not the first time they have worked together, of course, but the tracks Shipwreck and This are hypnotic and beguiling.

Beyond the Yorkie bombs are other highlights: the hotstepping German Clap, the digital urgency of the loping Grillwalker, the emotive melody on the PVT-collaboration Green Light and the absurd hip hop of Pretentious Friends (“the pâté was fabulous!”).

We’re so spoilt with this Berlin duo’s dexterity, confidence and (whisper it) pop sensibilities, it almost seems a shame that the claustrophobic Shipwreck b-side Dull Hull isn’t on show too.

Unstoppable, bass-driven, ear-hugging digitalism: this is the rise of the town of the monkeys. Come on my ‘selektor.

3 - Plaid - Scintilli

Plaid are a duo that arose from godfathers of bleepery The Black Dog and became the techno musician’s techno musician, much in the same way that Stewart Lee is the comedian’s comedian and your great granddad is the racist’s racist.

Until now, Spokes was their best post-1990s album: it had amazing tunes but, unlike actual spokes, didn’t quite hang together as a whole. Scintilli (Warp) is the scintillating icing on the, um, spoke cake.

Opening with jingling guitars, which brings to mind 2001’s Eyen, we’re quickly smothered with choral sorrow and their trademark awkward chord progressions. Eye Robot brings in the fuzzy techno, Thank leads us into the cheery eeriness seen on many a Plaid album and by the fourth track, the anthemnic Dr Who work-out of Unbank, we’re ready for a tea break. The rest of the album careers from sunny dance numbers (African Woods) to sheer strangeness (Talk To Us), but it’s all perfectly Plaid.

This band has spent five years dabbling in other media, most notably for their audio-visual project Greedy Baby, but they have been in danger of seeing their traditional fans drift off. In that respect, Plaid have checked themselves and produced their best album for at least ten years.

2 - Martyn - Ghost People

The Brainfeeder label was the success story of 2010, with important releases from Lorn, Teebs and The Gaslamp Killer, and a crucial partnership with Ninja Tune. They were responsible for the return of Mr Ozio this year and they were even a headline feature in the Guardian a month or two ago.

All along, however, I felt that without a Brainfeeder-labelled album from their godlike founder Flying Lotus (he releases on Warp), they’d never quite crack it. They just needed something... something extra. I don’t know. Something indefinable. A ghost, maybe.

Ghost People (Brainfeeder) is a spectre to behold and should be the album that propels Brainfeeder into the premier league. I’m mixing metaphors again. Martyn has produced an aural dystopia in which shards of rave and techno have darkness cast upon them until they glisten molten musical antimatter.

Popgun could just be bouncy Joy Orbison dubstep with the occasional vocal grunt, but the atmospherics lift the sound into something greater than its parts. The driving Bauplan is so beautifully melodic, you either want to go for a run or a cry. And the choppy We Are You In The Future sounds like the theme music for every techno track ever recorded. Everyone is trying this sound, but Martyn does it best.

I wrestled over the decision whether to make Martyn’s Ghost People my album of the year or not. But no. There is another. A debut album so great, so absorbing, with such unique production, it ought to have every kid with a smidgen of soul mimicking his sound. Stay tuned, dear reader, for my Album Of The Year 2011.

[This is part three. Click here for part one. Click here for part two. Click here for part four.]

Chosen Words: H is for House

a.k.a. World Cup Distraction Exercise: Fat Roland's A-Z guide to the most important words or phrases in electronica and their associated "facts"

House music exists because it is easy for DJs to mix.

House has often dominated dance music because it is a massive genre encompassing Josh Wink, Donna Summer, Deadmau5, Urban Cookie Collective, Tiësto and M People.

Some people say it was invented by Hugh Laurie when he realised his medical career was going nowhere. Some people say it died when Doop got to number one, although they did everyone a favour when they knocked Mariah Carey off the top spot.

Trance and acid house are good versions of house music, although the likes of Daft Punk, Justice and, more recently, Dam-Funk have reclaimed the mainstream genre for greater good.

According to Official Chart Company regulations section 47 paragraph 973, it is compulsory to have a house remix on your single.

Top five house music rhymes:

- Dmitri From Paris / Calvin Harris
- 808 State / Sven Väth
- K-Klass / Timo Mass
- Black Box / Carl Cox
- Anything ending in "Project" tends to rhyme with other things ending in "Project" and believe me there are a lot of them

For more Chosen Words, click the tag at the bottom of this post.

Someone call an Ambivilance: Bibio thrills as a radio star

Edit: This album is mentioned in my top ten electronica albums of 2009. 

If you don't buy the new Bibio album, you are stupid and you deserve to be pushed off a cliff by someone disappointing like Cash In The Attic's John Cameron.

The LP Ambivilance Avenue stretches two meaty legs across the decades, from sepia-smeared yesteryear summer pop, to future-bastard electronica that would make Justice control-alt-delete.

A little bit of me - the fascist bit of me that stomps on hamsters and sets fire to people in Father Christmas suits - shivers with disgust at the folky leanings of Bibio. But I'm a grown man now, and I am learning to accept that I can't always have it my way.

However, the bit of Bibio that is techno / IDM makes me want to caress him, have his children, buy a caravan with him, divorce him, split my CD collection with him, not talk to him for fourteen years, and following his plastic surgery to become the world's first human / camel freak, then sleep with him unknowingly in a one-night stand blinded by drunkenness and a half-watched DVD of The Story Of The Weeping Camel.

This kind of shizzle is the sort of shizzle that should be all over the radio. Even if you don't like Bibio (and you should), if you give a stinking damn about well-produced music, you should give Ambivilance Avenue a listen. In fact, if you have ears, you should be listening to this album right now.

No, actually, even if you don't have ears, you should give Bibio a listen. Even if you were run over by an angry tractor driver, and all you have left is a spleen, half an eyeball and the inside of your left knee, you should damn well give Bibio a listen.

Let the music speak for itself at Warp Records. Mind that cliff, now.

Monthly mop-up: cross-shaped houses, cross ambientalists, and not getting your wires crossed in the studio

I have scooped up this month's unused snippets of bloggery-pokery and baked them into one tasty pie of goodness, especially for you, my dear reader.  Think of this as my 'deleted scenes' extra for fatroland.com.

Before I get stuck in, absolutely my favouritest release this month was Lukid's Foma - more so than Squarepusher's Numbers Lucent.  A music producing chum described Numbers Lucent as "the sound of the inside of someones ass" if it had a bad Casio stuck inside it.  I think that was a compliment, but most of it sounded like the weaker noodly stuff that didn't qualify for his Just A Souvenir LP.

On to business...

Will HMV survive 2009?

Consider this quote from retail trend analyser Greg Hodge when he spoke to the BBC a few weeks ago:

"Is there room for a music store on the high street? The answer is probably no."

Things look grim, with the CD album under threat from the unbundling of albums on services like i-Tunes, the collapse of Zavvi because of a Woolworths-related supply disaster, and HMV-owning Waterstone's cutting jobs in their goods-in departments.  Will HMV survive 2009?  Yes.  They have reduced their losses and sales are actually up.  Is there room for a music store on the high street?  Yes, it's just that there will be less actual music in them, and lots more Wii.

Have you advice for recording in studios?

No, but Alan Parsons has.  My favourite bit is "don't suck the life out of a recording by overuse of limiting and compression."  You don't know how many times over-production annoys me, especially, oddly, in the Christian music industry.

Please make the fighting stop.

It did stop, but the headlines made for uncomfortable reading.  The prince of all that is ambient Brian Eno spent January being quite vocal about Gaza.  Go and read his Stealing Gaza piece at the angry Counter Punch site.  He has expressed his support for Palestine in various newspapers, including the NME.  Between him and Vince Cable, the Lib Dems seem to be kicking ass right now.

Where do Justice live?

In a big cross-shaped house, of course.  Well, not exactly, but some crazy French architects have built a house (abstract pictured above) in tribute to the duo. There's a wonderful quote from Kanye West:

"I want to live there so badly, but people would have to know that the house is a cross shape because of Justice, not because I was some sort of religious fanatic".

This from the guy who brought us Jesus Walks.

Recommend a band that's not strictly electronica.

I recommended the heavenly Here We Go Magic to the A New Band A Day website.  They liked what they heard and prompty posted it on their blog.  You should spend some time on A New Band A Day: there are many gems to be found.

In other internet news, you can get more random links and musical thoughts by following me on Twitter (see link in the sidebar of this site).  As I said to myself when choosing my sexuality, if it's good enough for Stephen Fry, it's good enough for me.

Swimming with the sharks in the (Basic) Channel

This week, I have been mostly listening to the relentless stabbing* of German techno.

Basic Channel's BCD-2 is well worth a listen if you like watery synths splashing on top of throbbing waves of shark-infested drum machines.

For the dedicated techno fan, this compilation of a decade or so of Basic Channel releases renders all those rare 12"s dead. But it's worth it for the inexorable attack of the bass drum. Go buy.

Off State-side now. Producer Mike Cadoo has reissued his 2005 internet album Shimmer And Fade in a real life album format.

Released under his Bitcrush moniker, the three ideas here are electronic noodling, pop sensibilities and live percussion. With guitars. Four ideas, then. Like an indie Lemon Jelly. Five.

It's a pleasant enough 70 minutes of listening, but I wish it didn't wear so many influences on its sleeve, whether it's Plaid, New Order, Boards Of Canada, early Verve, MBV, Lackluster or Proem. If he stuck to the drudging indie stuff, this could be magnificent.

Finally, holy child of Detroit Kenny Larkin (pictured) has made his Chronicles 12" series available on one double CD for the first time. Detroit's a little too smooth for me, but the packaging's pristine and you get a free mix too, so give the boy some love.

I'm not sure if Detroit has many sharks, so I can't end this post neatly by looping back to my original theme of infested waters. You'll have to write your own ending in the space below.
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*if you like relentless stabbing, there's a new documentary in which Justice slash up the face of a psycho fan. That's, like, soooo Dead Set.