VHS or Beta and The Presets at Talbott Street

Bands like VHS or Beta and The Presets are attempting to prove that it’s not only OK for a rock band to make you wanna dance, but that encouraging an audience of hipsters to shake their money makers can be goal No. 1. We’ll see how that all works out when Blow Up! takes over Talbott Street Tuesday, Sept. 12. The event marks the return of DJ Jonathan Keith to Indy, and he’s bringing some great acts along with him like VHS or Beta and The Presets.

VHS or Beta is a four-piece band whose sound draws a large part of its original inspiration from the French house and club scenes. Appropriately enough, they hail from a city named for a French monarch: Louisville, Ky.

Their latest album, Night on Fire, is a slickly produced package filled with a variety of songs reminiscent of Secret Machines, My Morning Jacket, Interpol, The Scissor Sisters or any number of new-wave revival hipster bands.

The general recipe for a VHS or Beta song could be summed up as follows: driving, funk bass; staccato electronic drums, often blending live performer with drum machine tracks; guitars using every effect pedal in the catalog from super-clean reverb to grungy, delayed distortion; and throaty, slurring vocals à la Robert Smith — when vocals are used at all.

Powering the VHS or Beta sound are the instrumental grooves that most of the tracks eventually melt down to. Once the lyrics disappear, the audience is left to either stand in place, tapping their feet and stoically enjoying the musicianship while the band is cranking out very catchy, dare I say it, discotheque beats, or to give in to that groove, throw back the rest of their vodka martini and make haste to the dance floor. The guys in VHS or Beta won’t mind, considering they frequently put down their guitars in favor of DJ gigs. It’s also of note that the band is signed to Astralwerks, home to dancehall favorites The Chemical Brothers and Fatboy Slim. So while the soaring guitars may bring to mind Joe Satriani or U2’s Edge, the mesmerizing flurry of the drum machines is telling you it’s OK to let loose.  

The Presets fall roughly into the same genre as VHS or Beta, though they occupy the opposite end of the spectrum. A two-piece, drums and keys band from Sydney, The Presets’ music could best be described as electro-punk. Their sound is trashy-but-glam techno-pop that could be compared to The Faint, LCD Soundsystem or Franz Ferdinand minus the guitars.
Like VHS or Beta, though, they clearly draw their influence from the ’80s new-wave movement, often sounding like Devo or Depeche Mode but with a little more grime encrusted on their Moog. Their debut album Beams pulses, throbs and vibrates with all manner of synthesized clicks and bleeps, all organized with surprising clarity into 12 very concise, post-modern pop tracks.

Their first single, “Are You the One?” begins with a four-on-the-floor drum beat and a finger-pounding piano line (think No Doubt’s “Hella Good” with a little more testosterone). The second track of interest is “Girl and the Sea,” which I listened to while watching the requisite art-school-weird music video. There were mermaids and wolves and … I don’t want to talk about it. The song itself is all ethereal synthesizer chords backed by no-frills drumming and moody vocals, reminiscent of Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence.” The rest of the album falls somewhere in between, constantly keeping things interesting with schizophrenic lyrics possessing all the NC-17-rated subtlety of a romance novel, and an impressively large array of drum machines and computer programs capable of a puzzling variety of noises.

When VHS or Beta and The Presets take the stage for Blow Up! this Tuesday at Talbott Street, “rock” will happen and it will be accompanied by dancing, which is, perhaps, just another more coordinated form of “roll.”