Justice

There's plenty of things that the French don't necessarily do better than anyone else, they just...well, they invented the phrase je ne sais quoi for a reason. And while I can't quite explain why Le Cercle Rouge is cooler than any other heist flick I've seen, or why I'd rather drive an Alpine-Renault A110 than a Porsche 911, I can at least justify France's lock on house music with a few well-placed names: Daft Punk, Alex Gopher, Alan Braxe, and now Justice. The last group's recently released debut, a Led Zeppelin IV-ishly-titled record alternately called , or Cross, is rougher, scuzzier and more abrasive than the work of their predecessor countrymen; if Daft Punk's Discovery was the disco utopia of Larry Levan's Paradise Garage, Cross is a boom box and a flat slab of cardboard in an abandoned subway station. Their combination of electro pop-lock rhythms, thick funk bass, and heavy metal thunder is the best thing to happen to house since the genre went minimal. 18+.
Tue., Oct. 16, 10 p.m., 2007