“Are You the One?”
from the album Beams
2006
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It’s been three years in the process and has been sitting at the ready at Modular Records for seven months while the label has been finalising a deal with Universal, as if their name the Presets had been taken too seriously with said record label. But now Beams is finally on the shelves and ready for you to bang-gang your best buddies to. If you’re a lady’s man you could do your girlfriend to it too, The Presets’ Kim Moyes assures Danny Corvini from raydar.com.au.
“I think it’s brotherhood gone wrong,” says Kim. “Julian and I have been best friends for a long time and we’re super close, and when we put a mask on it becomes just a little bit sleazy. It’s not like super trying to get in each other’s pants or anything, but it depends on how many E’s you give me. But chicks dig it. I don’t think we’re overtly gay, we’re just who we are, and it’s probably just sexual. I’ve read reviews where chicks are gagging… There’s one review at the moment that says ‘Why is it that listening to the Presets makes girls want to go find themselves a massive throbbing cock!’ and it’s like, I think it’s just confidence and sleaze more than any particular sexuality. We’re just the sort of people who like whatever.”
‘Julian and I have been best friends for a long time and we’re super close, and when we put a mask on it becomes just a little bit sleazy.’
The Presets ’80s vibe is like their sexual ambiguity in so far as it’s not deliberate and conscious, it’s just who they are and when they grew up, says Kim. “We grew up in the ’80s listening to pop and watching movies with bad synth sound effects like Mad Max and shit, and we ended up stumbling upon that shit years ago when we started getting interested in techno. When we started going through the ’80s analog synths we’d go ‘Oh wow, there’s that sound…’ or ‘… that sound.’ So it’s more of our palette than trying to be stylistically ’80s. We just like the gear from that stuff, from that time, and it just ends up sounding ’80s because that’s what it is.”
They’ve just gotten back from a European tour where the Girl and the Sea EP is being released through V2. They’ve also found themselves being signed up by iTunes for release in 25 countries. They’ve spent the last seven months being “band whores” because as Kim says, “it’s basically the only way you can survive.”
“We did a European tour with The Disassociatives, who I did all the drums for on their album and we played in their band last year when they toured Australia. It was good because they got the crowds down who came and saw us. And we did shows over there with Colder whose audiences who had no idea who we were, and we did a bunch of our own shows as well, and shows with Cut Copy. We’ve got heaps of fans over there now, I think it’s gonna be pretty good.”
They returned to Sydney as Modular released the first track off the album, Down Down Down, and did a tour for that, and have been in the studio producing The Cops and new indie punk band The Valentinos, who they’re also taking on tour with them. But despite getting their hands dirty like the little band whores they are, Kim says not many other bands’ hands got dirty making the Presets album.
“Our label was always looking for someone to come in and produce it and mix it but we could just never really think of anyone that we would want to have that kind of input. We admire people and really love what other people do, but we just couldn’t see how it would work in our musical vision. We were also working towards learning enough about that ourselves so that people would come to us, and that’s kind of what’s happening. But in terms of writing, we had a couple of tunes that friends came in and helped flesh out, particularly Daniel Johns. He helped us write two songs on the record, and also Girl was co-written by a friend of ours Sam Dickson, who also used to play bass in the band when we first started out. Everything else is pretty much ours.”
Kim describes the Presets’s Beams as “spazzzz dance faggggg rock”. This time next year they hope to have infiltrated every major act in Australia and to have torn it apart from the inside out, to have won as many ARIA awards as possible, made a shitload of money, and most importantly, he says, “to have as much fun as possible working with my best friend and seeing just how long it goes.”