Justice takes it to the streets, meekly

[Jeff Weiss boned up on his French and surveyed the scene at the South stage on Saturday night:]

Justice’s Coachella performance and subsequent Echoplex set have already passed into the stuff of legend. Those who were there described it with a level of hyperbole akin to a Moses parting the Red Sea armed with nothing but a pair of turntables and a crate full of old Daft Punk LPs. Truth be told, conventional logic suggested that by mid-May, at least four Silver Lake hipsters had perfected lustrous Gaspard Auge mustaches, purchased plane tickets to France and sought employment at various Parisian boulangeries to support their aspirations in the emerging Gallic techno scene.

So, perhaps it was these nearly insurmountable expectations that caused me to be unimpressed with the red-hot Parisian techno duo’s Detour Festival performance.

Unadorned by any stage show accoutrements, the set consisted of little more than Auge and his partner, Xavier de Rosnay, hovering over some turntables, rocking back and forth and periodically pumping their fists. There was no stage banter (do they even speak English?), no light show, not even a Girl Talk-esque wall of dancing bodies dotted with random B-list celebs (I’m sure they were lurking around somewhere) [Editor's note: They were pounding the very strong drinks made by the barkeeps on the City Hall lawn].

Instead, one of the festival’s most anticipated acts turned in a ho-hum set, techno jams that would’ve sounded at home during the brief rave boom of the late '90s and the occasional dirty Southern hip-hop track. As one person in the crowd put it, “Couldn’t we just go home, put the record on shuffle and turn it up really loud.”

But it wasn’t even that loud. You could carry on a normal conversation a mere 50 feet from the stage. Yet that didn’t seem to trouble the swarm of garishly clad hipsters who turned the City Hall South stage into a dancing neon mob of headbands and sweat. Word on the street is that Justice’s Monday and Tuesday night performances will be much better, as the duo trots out “the live set,” filled with allegedly dazzling background visuals. But either way, the set was a detour from the popular mythology that Justice are going to save the world, one glow stick at a time. 

||| Justice's show Tuesday at the Music Box @ Fonda is sold out, but a show Monday has been added.