As hundreds-- if not thousands-- of blog-house DJs have spent the past few years illustrating, some aspects of rock'n'roll can be imported pretty readily into dance. From the Fender-aping crunch of Justice's hyper-compressed chords to the noodly, scale-running arpeggios that have fast become Daft Punk's stock-in-trade, the traditional, most populist idea of rock has enjoyed a keening resurgence courtesy the unlikeliest source: the DJ. The ultimate answer to the question of whether that synergy works in both directions-- which is to say, whether dance music functions as well as a seasoning within a predominantly rock sensibility-- is still up for grabs, but as albums like this remind us, the truth is: uh, probably not.
Midnight Juggernauts are a three-piece from Melbourne, who, like the New Deal before them, are all about merging the musicianship and bombast of arena rock with the textures and physicality of dance. And while, after Justice and Kanye and T.I., it makes a strange kind of logic that the next iteration of French house in the mainstream should be by the hand of some dilettantish rock band, Dystopia inadvertently points to the practical hurdles to such a union. These are mostly producerly concerns: since French house is powered by massive sonic shifts like EQ sweeps and filters, it commands, by definition, a pretty massive chunk of the frequency spectrum on its own; and so, any attempts to harness that sound into functioning like just another instrument in a rock band are going to leave you with something that either sounds comically overstuffed or sadly tokenish.
It's a problem you can hear the trio grappling with over the course of the record. One of their favorite workarounds is to use instruments for the verses and have their burlier electronic arrangements take over for the choruses, but this constant baton-passing quickly starts to wear. The irony is that when they're not worrying so much about how or where to fit all their instruments into the mix, they sound more comfortable; between the juddering chorus to "Ending of an Era", the Gallic throwback of "Road to Recovery", and the rolling synth bassline in album highlight "Shadows", there's enough here to suggest they'd actually be better served by ditching their stubborn insistence on live material outright.
The kicker is that, without their live/electronic shtick to distinguish them, Midnight Juggernauts don't seem to be anything other than gifted mimics. As great as it is, "Road to Recovery" is de Homem-Christo & Bangalter with proggy lyrics, the awful "Tombstone" is a completely shameless Ratatat rip, and the title track, with its dreamy acoustic guitars, synth clouds, and hairpinning major chords, might as well have been lifted straight off one of the lesser Air albums. If you like all that stuff and you're forgiving enough that you're willing to put up with a band that does slightly inferior versions of same while simultaneously somehow sounding uncannily like the Moody Blues, well, these are the dudes for you. Everyone else: to the Roulé back catalogues you go.
