INXS. Nick Cave. Midnight Oil. The Presets? Manuscript tracks the electronic duo's bold attempt to join the Australian music canon.
Story Jonathan Seidler | Photography Jordan Graham
When
two highly skilled but emphatically bored Conservatorium of Music graduates
stumbled into the role of punk-dance prophets for a new generation of
Australian hedonists, it didn’t sound like a formula for a serious, lasting
career. Yet somehow, almost a decade later, Julian Hamilton and Kimberley Moyes
find themselves standing on a precipice so far above their contemporaries that
they have nobody to rebel against but themselves. Internationally acclaimed and
locally deified, The Presets return this spring with Pacifica, their third and perhaps
most dangerous outing yet. “We’re in a really gifted position right now where
we’ve worked really hard to get all of these people’s attention”, says Mr
Moyes, The Presets’ propulsive drummer and keyboardist. "Now we have a lot
of people waiting to hear what we do next, so let’s deliver it to them in the
most ambitious way that we can."
Whether
it’s turning up to the ARIA awards clad in Romance Was Born or remixing Kings
of Leon, The Presets revel in shocking their audience. It’s a trick they
perform to devastating effect on Pacifica, which was preceded by what Mr Moyes
refers to as the ‘face-melting techno’ of lead single ‘Youth In Trouble’ that
had tastemakers aflutter about the supposed new direction of the group who have
led Modular’s electronic brat pack – The Avalanches, Cut Copy and Van She – for
what seems like an era. They were right, of course, but also completely wrong.
A sprawling, ambitious record that encompasses a whole new spectrum of sounds
and ideas one would never typically associate with the group, Pacifica is
perhaps the best magic trick of all because it reveals what The Presets have been
masking their entire lives; namely, that they’re actually proper musicians. “One
of the concepts for the record was to base the centre around the piano and the
drums. We wanted every song to have some kind of subconscious meaning, which is
‘This is Julian and Kim and this is who we are and where we came from,’” says Mr
Moyes.
Where
The Presets come from, of course, is Sydney, Australia. Pacifica is defined not
only by its astonishing excursions into sledgehammer techno, classic mood rock
and major-chord synth-pop, but also by an inescapable, driving Australianness.
There’s a tune called ‘Ghosts’ that is a bass-drum driven convict sea shanty,
and another, ‘Adults Only’ which references Darlinghurst small bars, bushfires,
yuppies and cocaine. “I think in the past we were much more concerned with
presenting ourselves as an international act,” says Mr Moyes. “And in the wake
of all the success we had, particularly in Australia, we started to look at who
we were as Australians and as an Australian band, and who we liked growing up.”
This extends beyond Hamilton’s accent, which has always been pronounced on The
Presets' records but typically wrapped up in loop pedals, effects and pitch
modulators, through to the aesthetic of the songs themselves. “We looked at the
amazing quality of certain Australian acts, like INXS, Midnight Oil and Nick
Cave and wanted to create something that we felt could exist amongst records of
that calibre. This time around we didn’t want to disguise Julian’s voice. We
really went to town on previous records by layering it up in distortion and
creating these dark characters that were quite punk-y. Now we really tried to
take the mask off everything, in the most natural way we could.”
It’s
hard to move beyond ‘Adults Only’ when talking about Pacifica, a disturbingly
noir epic about the seedy underbelly of Sydney, because there’s just so much to
talk about in those six minutes. “We really wanted to inject a bit of this
feeling, which is something we personally have felt for a long time about
Sydney,” says Mr Moyes. “It’s this place that’s quite idyllic with good times
and beautiful beaches but there is a dark history to it and a dark present.
There’s something crook underneath it all and we wanted to draw attention to that,
perhaps to people we play to overseas, you know, who think Australia is all Home & Away and Neighbours.”
The
song ends with a menacing buzz of pure white noise that only relents at the
final moment. It’s uncomfortable, grating and never quite drops into the house
beat you’d imagine it would, which Mr Moyes maintains is the exact denial of
pleasure he was aiming for. “We were trying to create absolute tension. It’s
that non-verbal feeling of fear that we wanted to inject. Someone actually said
to us recently that the white noise at the end sounded like blowflies, which I
don’t think we thought about, but that adds another amazing Australian element
to the song.”
Perhaps
the most useful way to think about Pacifica is that it sounds like The Presets
after they’ve gone to bed at a reasonable hour (unlikely, given they’ve both
recently become fathers) and had a decent shower. The rebellious streak is
still there, but clean pop songs with very few bells and whistles have rinsed
in with the grime and dirt of their signature sound. Down tempo ballad ‘Its
Cool’ is almost completely organic, nothing but voice, drums and piano, while ‘Promises’
pumps out a major chord progression that is perhaps even more stunning than ‘Adults
Only’ because there’s not a hint of darkness in there. Nobody will see it
coming. Certainly hearing Hamilton sing out a proper pop melody instead of
flattening his notes to match club grooves will be a revelation – and a
divisive one at that – for many fans, but The Presets remain confident. “Pav
[Stephen Pavlovic, Modular CEO] told us ‘This album is the career definer. The
last one was a breakthrough success and if you nail this one, it sort of seals the
deal,’” said Mr Moyes. “At a certain point in the making of this record, we
needed to hear that.”
Have
the bad boys of electronica mellowed? “You have to remember we’ve both had kids
in this time, so we also have that circle of life sort of thing come to the
forefront. You see in your child and start to look back at yourself, and become
less concerned about where you’re heading. We are fortunate to be in a position
where we could settle down and enjoy those moments of inspiration and not worry
about whether anyone would listen to it if it didn’t sound a certain way.
Hopefully it comes across like that, but it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t,” says
Mr Moyes. “I don’t really care either way if the next wave of great Australian
music is electronic or not, I just want it to be great.”