That French disco-metal producers Justice would lead the charge to make the moribund live album relevant again is at once surprising and completely unsurprising. A recording of a performance by an arena-level dance act is a tough sell, especially, you might think, since Deadmau5 came clean on his Tumblr about the extent to which such “performances” often consist of little more than pressing play on a pre-sequenced audio track. But that's never been Justice's style: Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay disavow any categorization as dance music performers, and take their live shows very seriously, basing their performances around the manipulation of up to 16 simultaneous audio tracks while adding live flourishes on a bank of synths and MIDI controllers, making them one of the few existing electronic acts where the impulse for the crowd to arrange itself facing the stage actually seems justified.
As a dance act that have always carried themselves more like an arena rock band than an arena dance act, embracing the excess-inclined live album makes total sense alongside their crucifix iconography, Marshall stacks, and leather-jacketed image. Their 2008 tour DVD (with accompanying concert CD) was a highly watchable, totally seedy rampage through every substance abusing, tour-manager-carrying-a-handgun cliche in the debauched rock star book. And adding a certain amount of chaos and opening up opportunities for human error gives Justice’s live shows an organic energy that dance music doesn’t often have. On Access All Arenas, recorded on July 19, 2012, at les Arènes de Nimes, microfractional deviations from the beat and the occasional slightly rough transitions are steady reminders that there are actually two guys working with the sounds in real time.
It also helps that like most good performers, Justice aren't afraid to radically alter their songs for a live setting. Their setup encourages revisions to the material, and the duo seems to relish the opportunity to tear their songs apart and rebuild them in sometimes radically different shapes. Here, on their signature cut “D.A.N.C.E.” the pair move its acapella breakdown from near the end of the song to the beginning, then add in theatrically melodramatic strings, piano, and what sounds like a synthesizer tweaked to sound like a big, crunchy distorted electric guitar. Then they dial things back down for some call-and-response with the crowd, before finally easing into something like the version we’re used to. The bass doesn’t even kick in until almost four minutes into it. Towards the end they replicate the loop around which Swizz Beatz built “On to the Next One”, then break into a cover of it briefly, just for fun. Later they do a little more fan service by dropping a few snippets of Simian's "Never Be Alone" into the tail end of “Stress”.
The newer material from their underappreciated 2011 album Audio, Video, Disco (this recording is taken from the year-long world tour they took in support of it) isn’t exempt from the pair’s deconstructionist tendencies. Audio displayed a stronger influence from prog and krautrock than their earlier material ever did, and it could easily have worked if they had played it completely straight. It’s lucky that they didn’t. One of the most successful revisions here is “On’N’On”; the original studio version was a serviceable but not especially noteworthy piece of synthy prog pop with a catchy vocal by Diamond Nights’ Morgan Phalen. On Access All Arenas, it appears as the first song of their encore, with an extended, stripped-down introduction consisting of Phalen’s part over a four-on-the-floor kick drum and a heavy bass line, before noodling off into prog for a minute, then exploding into celestial synths and a monster arena rock beat that reignites the massively energetic crowd. Their decision to bring back the “We Are Your Friends” hook one more time at the end may strike some as cheesy, but the sound of so many people simultaneously losing their shit when that occurs would suggest that the audience didn’t think so.
Crowd noise is a constant presence on Access All Arenas. The 2,000 or so people who filled the nearly two millennia-old Roman-built arena on the night of the recording were an enthusiastic group, and their cheering gives Justice’s radical shifts in dynamics some extra lift. Recording the crowd noise was obviously intentional, since all of the audio signals the pair are manipulating run direct, meaning no microphones are required to pick up ambient sound. If they’d recorded directly from of the signal running to the soundboard the results would have sounded like a studio album of extreme self-remixes, which would probably have been extremely interesting. But Justice are all about the spectacle; even if you weren't there to appreciate the show in person, they'll make damn sure you know that 2,000 others did.
