Presets at Metro. Photo: Tyler Curtis

One of the most interesting aspects of the rise of indie dance music is the way audiences have gotten more comfortable with participating in what’s now an in-crowd trend. A few years ago, ’80s–influenced dance rock was like the weird new kid at school with the out-of-date clothes—now it’s like the cheerleader, the football player and the class rebel all in one. Last night’s Presets gig at Metro brought this to mind as it might have been the most participatory live dance set I’ve seen at the club not counting a Basement Jaxx show years back. In other words, a variety of people came to dance. The thing is—amid the laser lights, the Presets resemble a live band, playing drum kits and live synths, singing. But they wouldn’t exist without the sequenced beats of laptops. They are clearly one step away from a live laptop performance—but having toured for a solid year on their latest album, they bring a lot of rock moves to the table. There’s plenty to look at, but it’s a better bet to just tune in to the beat. Coming on after the highly blogged-about Golden Filter—with a singer who’s all long legs and bangs, plus percussion set to lethargic, lush nu-disco rhythms, the Presets came out hitting extra hard before settling into an extended set of manic electro intercut with gothy breakdowns. An interlude with gauzy synths and live xylophone brought a big dose of krautrock oddness to the set, but more often the Presets stuck to their Depeche-Mode-sucker-punching-Interpol approach on tunes like “This Boy’s in Love” and “Talk Like That.” The band’s trance rave has a primitive appeal that gets the baseball-hat sporters, yuppie ex-new-wavers and off-duty club dancers moving in the same rhythm. The band does have some faults— it sometimes comes off as grating when it merely means to be tough—but that contrast between the fey, androgynous side of Euro electro and punishing manliness has a lot of room for this duo to play in.

Over at Sonotheque, the sounds of Zizek Urban Beats Club were a good bit fresher to my ears as I didn’t grow up on cumbia or Miami bass. Grant Dull spun electro cumbia and bass-inflected South American dance music before DayGlo-patterned MCs Catar_sys and Color Kit took the stage as Fauna, dishing out rhymes over insistent, vibrant but also really quite arty beats. It was like reggaeton for students of post-modern theory—and the crowd was largely made up of South American expats. It felt like a good mix of econ grad students and the global avant-garde—give ‘em a few years and they’ll be the in-crowd.