For their second studio album, Justice shed the nocturnal atmosphere of † in favor of peppier moods and song styles which draw from ‘80s pop prog, a la Genesis, by way of spangly electric guitar wankery and pseudo-spiritual posturing and shallow sociological pondering. Though they keep the short audio cuts and strong beats of the first album, the overt sampling is lower, and the synths generally feel more hammered-down in comparison to the buzzy aggression of their earlier usage. Those changes don’t keep the band from turning out several memorable tunes, though, even if the earworminess comes down to a hooky main riff over the full song’s shaping more often than not.
That lackluster song-writing seems all the more strange in the face of the apparent care for arranging the tracks within the album, with a loose narrative told through song titles and a separated intro for one of the central songs. The production work is stellar, though, and a trio of guest vocalists add to the grand assembly vibes, but in the end, it feels a little too aimless and overwrought to fit either its affected antiquity or wallowings in retro-pop excess.
Scrambled Brains 