The Presets - It’s Genius, I Swear
By: Various Scribes
I first fell in love with The The after seeing the video to the perfectly blissful pop song 'This Is The Day' on a music video show when I was 12 or 13, but it was many years later that I actually purchased the album Soul Mining. I didn't really expect to get what I got on this record. I guess I knew very little of the band and Matt Johnson and expected the album to be quite different, but I absolutely adored 'This Is The Day'. It's one of those perfectly melancholic songs that make you feel good about feeling bad, give you hope to get through the day or any awkward period you might be going through.
I am pretty sure that when I bought Soul Mining it was the first time that I decided to live by myself and was breaking up with my girlfriend at the time. I sort of obsessively played the album on repeat for a couple of weeks and since then it gets an airing fairly regularly.
Soul Mining was made in 1983, Matt Johnson's second album and around the same time that New Order and Human League were making bubbly synth pop and bands like The Cure where encouraging everyone to wear black eyeliner and hang out at the cemetery. Apart from the drum programming and some of the synth sounds somehow, Soul Mining doesn't sound like it belongs in this period. The songs are all very personal and dark with moments of blissful hope and social comments on Thatcher's UK. The influences on the production range from African tribal chants and drum choruses, piano accordion to bubbly Madonna-esque bass lines and bar room jazz piano solos courtesy of none other than Jools Holland.
I had a lot of older friends when I was an early teen who used to introduce me to so much music, swapping mix tapes, and I remember once 'Uncertain Smile' was on one of these tapes. 'Uncertain Smile' starts with a Marimba part that has some sort of tremolo effect on it, being a percussion major at music school this was a very interesting technique to me. It's not until the song kicks in that you realize how great a poet Matt Johnson is. I've always loved the chorus 'I've got you under my skin where the rain cant get in / but if the sweat pours out / just shout / I'll try to swim and haul you out..."
'This Sinking Feeling' starts like a stripped back techno-house song and then the lyrics paint such ugly imagery of Thatcher's England while the bass line from 'GIANT' sounds like a dark cousin of Madonna's 'Holiday'.
This album put things into perspective for me in terms of making music to feel good or because you feel bad or because things are wrong and could be better. There is a harsh reality to the songs and it doesn't seem to step too far into fantasy. The production is so clever in its creative use of combining styles that it really gives it a sense of timelessness.
It's a pop album and it's an art album and the use of the synths and drum machines give it such a slight feeling of the 80's club too, but it's the lyrics that set Soul Mining apart from everything else. I think that this album, while kinda short, is one of the great artistic attempts of the 1980's.
by Kim Moyes - The Presets' album Apocolypso is out now via Modular records.
Artists in this article: The Presets