One record at a time: 538. Justice - Hyperdrama

I have bought all of Justice’s albums since their 2007 debut, “†”, but always on compact disc. It was only with the advent of 2024’s “Hyperdrama” that I abandoned CD in favour of vinyl. The band's back catalogue have all been reissued on vinyl, but I do not feel any burning desire to spend the £86.16 it would require to add them to my shelves. I like Justice, but of the wave of electronic artists who emerged around 2007, they have always fallen a little behind their contemporaries. Digitalism had more imagination, Simian Mobile Disco had sharper production, and Soulwax sounded as if they had found a secret cupboard marked “ideas” and decided not to report it to anyone. Justice make dance music, certainly, but it often veers towards disco and can get a bit silly at times. As I have said on this blog before, I do not like silliness in my music, so I have often found myself tapping my feet in a slightly disapproving manner, which is the most middle-aged form of rebellion available to me.

To be fair, Justice have shifted their sound over time, and this album finds them leaning more into club culture than seventies disco cheese. “Neverender”, which opens the album, is a collaboration with Tame Impala and sounds a bit like Daft Punk with a bit of Chemical Brothers for structural support. It is great stuff. Next up is “Generator”, which throws in various Alpha Juno-style hoover noises and rave sounds you thought had been safely lost to the nineties until they form a particularly excellent audio trifle, complete with string section. “Afterimage” is another massive track, with RIMON’s vocal hovering above the driving rhythms and squealing synths like balm on a sore wound, assuming the balm has been administered at 130 beats per minute.

Also worthy of mention is another Tame Impala collaboration, “One Night/All Night”, whose dark techno pulse suits Justice like a well-tailored jacket. The bass playing of Xavier de Rosnay sounds especially good on tracks like “Dear Alan”, giving the album a muscular low end without making it feel as though it has simply wandered into a gym and started shouting at a mirror.

“Moonlight Rendez-vous” is clearly an attempt to change down a gear, but it falls a bit flat for me and, as we know, saxophone is rarely the answer, children. “Saturnine” reaches for an R&B feel but leaves me colder than an afternoon spent in a chiller, even if there is a cheeky Art of Noise sample lurking in there like it has broken in through a side door. 

“Hyperdrama” is like a crazy puppy that launches itself at you when you first walk in, all paws, teeth and enthusiasm, before gradually remembering it has been to obedience class. It is still a very good puppy, but I cannot help preferring it before it learnt to sit and roll over. 3.5/5

One record at a time: 537. Howard Jones - One To One

This record came into my possession a couple of years ago, though I had completely forgotten where I bought it from until I pulled it from the shelves and spotted the charity shop sticker still proudly clinging to the sleeve proclaiming the sale price of £1.15. As I have lamented before on this blog, charity shops are not exactly awash with treasures these days, so finding something like this feels less like crate-digging and more like encountering a unicorn. There is not a mark on the record and it plays perfectly, so whoever owned it before me clearly treated it with more respect than I treat most houseplants. The median price on Discogs for this album is £2.66, which means I am already more than £1.50 in the black and can enjoy a brief, financially unjustified moment of smugness.

By 1986, Howard Jones had already scored hits around the world and secured his place as an international act. Produced by the legendary Arif Mardin, this album sees Jones using the Fairlight for the first time and aiming for a bigger, glossier sound. Or, depending on your point of view, making a slightly ill-judged bid for the attention of American radio.

The album kicks off with the lead single "You Know I Love You... Don't You?", which was something of a commercial disappointment on release. Personally, I like the song, although I can see why its less-than-fluid lyrics might have slipped past radio programmers with barely a ripple. Second track "The Balance Of Love (Give And Take)" brings in some deep, funky bass, and once the distinctive sound of the DX7 appears, it starts to feel almost perfect from an eighties production perspective.

As the first side progresses, we get a run of well-produced and perfectly competent tracks, but several are missing the little hook that would have pushed them from album-track territory into hit material. The backing vocals on "Where Are We Going?" could not be cheesier if they had been dipped in fondue, while the proto-electro of "Don't Want To Fight Anymore" is so out of place it is almost irresistible. One thing that stands out in Mardin's production is the deeper bass, which gives the record a different feel from Jones's earlier work. The trouble is that bass, however splendidly upholstered, cannot always carry a song on its own.

Side two opens with "Step Into These Shoes", which has a spring in its step but "Pearl in a Shell" it is not. "Will You Still Be There?" is gentler and more reflective, but boy does it go on, and on, and on. "Good Luck, Bad Luck" is one of the more immediate tracks here, with a brisker pulse and the sort of neatly clipped chorus that reminds you HoJo had not entirely mislaid his pop instincts. "Little Bit Of Snow" closes things on a more delicate note, complete with string arrangement and a sense that everyone in the studio had briefly looked up for Page R on the Fairlight and wandered outside to touch grass.

Overall, "One To One" is not Howard Jones at his most dazzling or immediate, but it is far from the misfire some might suggest. It is slick, occasionally over-polished and sometimes a little too keen to sound grown-up, but as a charity shop find for £1.15, it delivers considerably more than the purchase price demanded, which is all one can reasonably ask in this day and age. 3/5

One record at a time: 536. Jean Michel Jarre - Live In Bratislava (Bridge From the Future)

Back in the lead-up to Jarre’s 1990 performance at La Défense in Paris, the ambient piece “Waiting for Cousteau” was played over the PA to build atmosphere and fill the air with music, like a perfume of anticipation. For his more recent grand open-air concert in Bratislava, Slovakia, in 2024, Jarre returned to the same idea, this time using a new composition written specifically for the event.

Ambient music is usually designed to drift gently past you, not arrive in a £90 box set glowing like Doctor Manhattan. Still, with Jean-Michel Jarre, even the background music tends to come with a sense of occasion. 

The piece was titled “Bridge From the Future” and was only made available as part of the “Ultimate Collector’s” box set of the live album documenting the concert. Rather bafflingly, none of the concert itself is presented on vinyl in this set and the only way to hear the ambient piece from physical media is on the 10-inch blue vinyl included in the box. 

Everything about this release feels like it was cobbled together with little attention to detail. Jarre has admitted that the audio was taken from the television broadcast, which used a compressed 128 kbit/s sound file. Most of us probably would not notice the drop in quality, but it hardly screams “Ultimate”, unless “ultimate” now means “recorded off the telly”.

As for the piece "Bridge From the Future", it is fine enough as ambient music. There are rain noises, snippets of reversed speech and the usual drone-like synth textures. It is not meant to seize your attention, more to hover politely in the background, and in that sense it does its job. What grates is having to spend a sizeable amount of money on a poorly judged box set to own it. Sometimes I can see why people use nothing but YouTube for their music. Those of us who prefer physical media are being taken for a ride, and this one does not even come with decent sound. A bridge from the future, perhaps, but unfortunately one that charges a toll. 1/5

One record at a time: 535. Jean Michel Jarre - Versailles 400

“Versailles 400” documents a concert Jarre gave at the Château de Versailles on Christmas Day 2023. Ostensibly, the performance marked the 400th anniversary of the palace, although once you remember that Versailles is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and Jarre is a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador, you can probably make an educated guess as to who bankrolled the whole thing.

As the concert was held in the Hall of Mirrors, they could only squeeze a few hundred people into the room, so the event was broadcast on YouTube for the unwashed masses. I suspect you had to be related to Jarre, employed by UNESCO, or have a surname that appears on a building somewhere in Paris to get a ticket. The first recordings of the concert were released digitally, with this vinyl edition following the following  year as a limited run of 2,000 individually numbered copies.

As for the music, I’ve complained before about Jarre going all techno and his apparently constant need to update his classic works in an EDM style. I’m not a fan of this approach. I love a solid four-on-the-floor kick drum as much as the next person, especially if the next person is standing in a field in Belgium at three in the morning, but Jarre was always about more than that. His melodies, beguiling chords and sweeping atmospheric twinkle were the point. Put them under a formulaic techno sheen and even the most impressive compositions start to sound oddly flat, like champagne served in a sports bottle.

After the twee and rather fake-sounding baroque opening “La Château”, we are thrust into “Epica Oxygene”. As the name suggests, this is an amalgam of “Oxygene Part IV” and “Epica”. Before you start applauding Jarre’s seemingly endless drive to innovate, it is worth noting that the track was originally created for a Renault commercial. Jarre might call it “a design collaboration”, but he has essentially slapped the tune from “Oxygene” over the beats of “Epica”, given it a polish, and hoped nobody checked the service history. The end result is fine, but it is hardly going to blow up YouTube.

Whenever Jarre plays “Oxygene 2” nowadays, he seems to insist on subjecting us to two and a half minutes of directionless improvisation before launching into the distinctive melody. All this noodling does nothing for the composition. It does not build atmosphere or anticipation; it just gets in the way of the bit we all paid to hear, like someone explaining the fire exits during the best part of a film. “Equinoxe 4” sounds similar to the lacklustre version he created in 1990 for the “Paris La Défense” concert, while the sped-up version of “Equinoxe 7” sounds like it is in a hurry to get out of there because it has remembered it has left the oven on. 

One of my favourite Jarre tracks is “Chronologie 6”, and the version here benefits from staying largely faithful to the perfection of the original. “Zero Gravity” and “Stardust” are a couple of techno and trance behemoths that you either love or loathe. I’m sure younger fans might like them, but for me these tracks don’t really represent Jarre. There is something slightly wrong about a man approaching eighty years of age knocking out thumping techno. Admirable, certainly. Unexpected, definitely. But still slightly like finding your grandad headlining Creamfields. I’m glad the big man is still around, actively making music and engaging with his fans. I just wish he’d make some music I can enjoy again. Never has a lazily created AI image with little relevance to the music been such a fitting sleeve. 2/5

One record at a time: 534. Jean Michel Jarre - Oxymore Works

Back in 2023, I reviewed Jarre's album "Oxymore" and found it dull, oddly joyless, and almost entirely free of either melody or groove, which is quite an achievement for an electronic album. I suggested it was one of his worst records, and time has not softened my view. 

For reasons best known to Jarre, he then released this remix album in which he invited other artists to create new versions of tracks from "Oxymore". In theory, this extends the "Electronica" concept, but in practice it means household names such as Deathpact, French 79 and NSDOS (No? Me neither) get to add a four-on-the-floor kick drum under Jarre’s abstract noodling. Martin Gore of Depeche Mode and Brian Eno return, while Armin van Buuren arrives to pour a thick layer of generic trance over one track, like custard on a circuit board.

Gore's effort, "Brutalism" is a fairly straightforward techno track that repurposes some of the samples from the original and carries the same sinister vibe, but it has neither the groove nor the ideas to sustain interest across its five-minute runtime. It is a similar story with "Epica Extension", which uses the same sound palette as the original and throws in additional rhythm, but still manages to remain stubbornly boring. The same track is also reworked with Armin van Buuren, with results that are exactly as predictable as you fear. "Sex In The Machine Take 2" sounds like something any bedroom musician with a copy of Fruity Loops could create, and the two takes on "Zeitheist" towards the end of the album are similarly vanilla.

My favourite track here is "Brutalism Reprise" which was recorded with Deathpact. You should probably adjust your expectations if you are waiting for the new "Chronologie Part 4", but this one does actually sound pretty good and, more importantly, has something new to offer. The presence of one good track makes this album less a mixed bag and more a charity shop lucky dip where the one decent item is buried beneath several cracked ashtrays and a fondue set nobody wanted in the first place. Honestly, I'd rather listen to David Gray than this, and I do not say that lightly. My fear is that one day the great man might pass from this world, and something like this will end up being his swan song. 1/5

One record at a time: 533. Jean Michel Jarre - Les Granges Brûlées

Created with rudimentary instruments and released before Jean-Michel Jarre had become an established recording artist, “Les Granges Brûlées” occupies that strange pre-fame territory where historical importance and actual listenability are not always on speaking terms. 

As this album was not repressed following its initial release in 1973, it had become rare and sought-after by the time I became aware of it in 1989. Like “Deserted Palace”, I first heard it on a bootleg CD called “Rarities”, and I was so startled by its sound that I half believed it could not really be the work of Jarre at all. It felt less like the missing link between “Deserted Palace” and “Oxygène” and more like someone had locked a young composer in a cupboard with a synthesiser, an organ, and only intermittent access to daylight.

This is, of course, a soundtrack to a film, although once I had heard the music I cannot say I was seized by an urgent need to watch it. Soundtracks are tricky beasts. They may be perfect when welded to the visuals, but left to fend for themselves on a stereo they can sound like someone has mislaid half the evidence. In this case, the film may well be supplying all the tension, motive and atmosphere that the album merely gestures towards.

There are melodies here, and the main theme is perfectly respectable, but the EMS Synthi VCS3 and Farfisa organ seem to be working overtime to produce even the most rudimentary sounds. Given the sparse equipment involved, that is perhaps part of the fascination: you can almost hear the machinery thinking about what it wants to be when it grows up. Even so, fascination is not quite the same as enjoyment. 

Much of the album has an abstract, wintry seriousness to it, while “Zig-Zag” is the obvious anomaly, sitting awkwardly against the record’s otherwise tense and skeletal tone. I still cannot imagine what scene it was meant to accompany, unless the film briefly turns into a chase sequence involving a clown, a small dog, and a suspiciously well-stocked trail of banana skins. To be honest, I was not really surprised that neither Jarre nor his record label appeared to be in a great hurry to re-release the album.

Then, completely out of the blue, “Les Granges Brûlées” finally received an official CD reissue in 2003. Fast forward another twenty years and this limited edition vinyl appeared via Bandcamp on Transversales Disques, remastered from the original master tapes. The record is very nicely pressed and comes in a poly-lined sleeve with a separate card inner, along with that all-important collector’s guarantee of quality: an Obi strip. Because nothing says “serious archival release” quite like a decorative band of paper that immediately makes you terrified of damaging the packaging. 

All in all, this is a handsome, well-presented release with strong sound reproduction and a genuine sense of historical value. It is also, regrettably, a reminder that not every historically interesting record needs to be invited round for dinner. As a document of early electronic film scoring, it is fascinating; as an album to play for pleasure, it remains rather skeletal when divorced from its visuals. 2/5

One record at a time: 532. Jean Michel Jarre - Deserted Palace

Back in 1989, I bought Jean-Louis Remilleux’s biography of Jean-Michel Jarre. Before the internet turned every obscure fact into a three-second search, books like this were a goldmine for music-obsessed teenagers like me. While reading it, I spotted a partial discography on page 31 that listed two albums I had never heard of. Until then, I had assumed Jarre’s career began with “Oxygène”, so it was a genuine revelation to discover that his debut was actually “Deserted Palace” from 1972. 

The record was long out of print and certainly not lurking hopefully in the CD racks of my local HMV, so it quickly took on near-mythical status. I resigned myself to never owning a copy, and probably never hearing the music at all. Over the years, the occasional LP would surface in mail-order catalogues, but the asking price seemed less like retail and more like a ransom note printed in Record Collector magazine. As a teenager, I could barely afford the French maestro’s latest CD, never mind a rare collector’s item changing hands for hundreds of pounds. 

I did finally get to hear the music when I bought a bootleg CD called “Rarities” in the early nineties. When I first played it, I have to admit I was a little underwhelmed. I had not expected the album to be as polished as “Oxygène” or “Équinoxe”, but I was not quite prepared for how raw, slight and frankly odd it sounded. It was less the grand opening chapter of a glittering electronic career and more the sound of someone finding the keys to the synth cupboard and deciding to have a busy afternoon.

At this stage of his career, Jarre was still a jobbing songwriter and producer rather than the spectacular recording artist who would later fill docklands, skylines and UNESCO-approved landmarks with lasers. “Deserted Palace” was not designed as a conventional pop album. It was a library record, intended to provide short electronic pieces for use in television and media productions. Electronic music was still in its infancy in 1972, so perhaps the hope was that these strange new sounds would appeal to producers and creative types looking for something futuristic, unusual or just sufficiently inexpensive.

The album covers a surprising range of styles, including rap, baroque pastiche, rock gestures and more abstract experimental pieces, although everything is realised through the rather unforgiving combination of a VCS3 synthesiser and a Farfisa organ. As a result, the sound palette is limited, to put it kindly. Some tracks hint at melodies and ideas that would later become far more convincing in Jarre’s hands, but others sound like they were assembled while the equipment was still reading the instruction manual.

This new 2025 pressing is nicely presented, and the back cover describes it as “Volume 1”, which is optimistic in a way I almost admire. Whether “Volume 2” ever emerges remains to be seen, but I am not clearing shelf space just yet. As a historical curiosity, “Deserted Palace” is interesting, and for Jarre completists it fills an important gap. As an album to actually sit and enjoy, however, it is rather hard work. The palace may be deserted, but on this evidence, it may also have had a few problems with the heating. 1/5