Sunday Synthpop Brunch: 'Primitive Man'

Years before they became a two-hit wonder in the U.S. (thanks to "Crazy" and "Electric Blue"), Australia's Icehouse were haunting a handful of new-wave and college stations with their dark-tinted, yet highly melodic electronic pop. Sounding at times like David Bowie fronting Joy Division, Icehouse had a much starker sound early on than hinted at by their later American chart hits. This was especially true of their second album, Primitive Man (1982), largely due to the fact that there was no actual band at the time. After dissolving the intial band lineup, singer Iva Davies crafted Primitive Man nearly single-handedly, with assiatance provided by producer Keith Forsey (a session drummer for sundry Georgio Moroder projects in the 1970s and later become one of the pre-eminent pop producers of the 1980s), and it's from that album that we source this inaugural Synthpop Sunday Brunch.

The hypnotic reverie "Hey Little Girl" served as the Icehouse's true American breakthrough, at least as far as MTV was concerned. Though the fledgling channel had a couple of earlier videos by the band in sporadic rotation from their archives, this clip received heavy airplay for months on end in the summer and fall of 1982. Alternating color and black-and-white photography to dreamlike effect, "Hey Little Girl"'s hazy, shadowy visuals perfectly complimented the song's skittering, skeletal percussive track and eerie, chime-like synth chords.

Perhaps due to the original videoclip for the song being rather unremarkable in comparison, "Great Southern Land" never became as well-know its predecessor...at least not until its prominent use years later in the movie Young Einstein (which I believe represents the entire U.S. career of Australian hellspawn Yahoo Serious). It's a real shame this song fell through the cracks stateside, for its breathtaking sweep arguably represents the pinnacle of Icehouse's career. As with "Hey Little Girl," it doesn't take a lot to make "Great Southern Land" work: a driving bassline, a simple synth figure, a double-tracked vocal and a compressed Linn Drum loop is all it takes for Davies to conjure images of wide, empty desert vistas in our mind.