Additional personnel: Uffie, Felix Zadek-Ewing, Harriet Syndercombe-Court, Francesca Levin, Aubrey Allegretti, David Christopher Ragusa, Matthiew Cullen O'Keefe, Demitri Mitchell-Palmer, Dvno (vocals).

It could be said that electronic musicians have a tendency to obsess over sonic detail in a way that your average garage rock band may find hard to understand. The young Parisian duo Justice (Gaspard Auge and Xavier de Rosnay), seem, for the most part, unfettered by niceties such as sonic subtlety or restraint. Combining French-touch house with large doses of heavy-metal hedonism, the group's debut, CROSS, privileges rock's devil-may-care mid-range thrash over electro's low-frequency thump.

The album, in classic rave style, is all about colossal riffs. Whether through its swirling synth sweeps or pile-driving funk loops, CROSS has an insistent, torqued, vaguely druggy quality that's resolutely unsubtle. If the album embraced such high-octane thrills for its entire length, it would surely have overstayed its welcome. But Justice manages to pull out a corker of a pop-crossover hit with "D.A.N.C.E.," the album's first single. Instantly hummable, with its Sesame Street style sing-along chorus, the song is an ebullient, slightly nostalgic nod to '80s electro-funk. Reminiscent of another album that ignited a youth culture revolution (Daft Punk's HOMEWORK), Justice seem intent on winning a new generation over with their head-banging house music.

French boys Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Augé originally got their start in the music scene playing in bad Metallica and Nirvana cover bands, and the album art of Cross makes it look like a doomy metalcore release, but the record is anything but metal. In fact, it's almost everything but metal. It's a grimy mix of dancehall, techno, '80s R&B, and lounge with Clockwork Orange synths, deadly static crunches, hard-hitting kicks, grinding groans, and a spliced Off the Wall slap-popping bass. Scattered and chopped to all hell, the songs often feel revolutionary. This is partially due to the duo's "anything goes" attitude. It's as if Justice is reacting to complacency in latter-day electronic music and seeing how far they can take their slicing and dicing before the chopped up compositions fall apart. At certain moments, samples are dissected into such little snippets that it's hard to even decipher the instrument from the clicks and pops in-between the splices. Usually when the songs unravel to this point, they suddenly halt and get reeled back in to cohesion with the sudden snapback of a fishing lure that has been swept into the rapids. Instead of using their laptops to keep their beats tight and precise, Justice uses them to shake up their songs to such a gnarled, jittery point that they sometimes sound like mistakes. These happy accidents give the tunes a humanistic touch, like futuristic beats deconstructed by cavemen. While the instrumentals are often sinister and melancholy, as if they were concocted in a cold, cavernous atmosphere (which they were, in Rosnay's basement), the tracks with vocals are perfectly designed for a hot nightclub. "DVNO" has disco handclaps and bouncy vocals that could have been ripped from Oingo Boingo, "D.A.N.C.E." is tricked out with a Go! Team double-dutch flavor, and "Ththhee Ppaarrttyy" incorporates a cute-voiced rapper coaxing her friends to get "drunk and freaky fried" over a keyboard potentially lifted from Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants. At the darker end of the dance spectrum, "Stress" is an exhausting exercise in patience with a teapot whistle screaming over a tension-building Space Invaders type bassline, and "Waters of Nazareth" combines a crunchy church organ with a bottom-heavy synthesizer rolling in gravel. Admirably random samples dug up from underground sources like '70s Italian prog-rockers Goblin, combined with a reckless abandon and an adherence to melodic hooks, makes Cross one of the most interesting electro-crossovers since Ratatat, and the guys in Justice do an excellent job building on Daft Punk's innovative foundation. ~ Jason Lymangrover