Music

The glamorous magazines and fashionable broadsheet supplements may have tempted you into believing that there is an exciting youth movement underway, called ‘new rave’. The kids, they say, are all wearing baggy tops, and dancing to repetitive bleeps in dark places! Fancy that! The truth, of course, is that this sort of thing catches on round about this time every year, when the new students get to college and start necking pills. All that’s changed is the semantics – most of the acts involved, from Hot Chip to Simian Mobile Disco, were previously lumped together under the ‘electro’ banner, and the others have little in common beyond the luridity of their clothing.

Presets deal in a dramatic take on electro, coming on like a futuristic cop show theme with added vocoder hectoring. It’s retro in a more obvious way, like if Heaven 17 had gone hardcore.