The Primitive Calculators were from Australia, beginning in Springvale, a town not too far outside of Melbourne. Considering the band never moved to the large city, though, should lend a view of the group as an assemblage of weirdo outsiders. And you haven’t even heard the music yet.
Apparently, the Calculators rubbed shoulders with a pre-Birthday Party group Nick Cave did time in. And if one musters enough memory to summon a few other groups from the land down under which had nothing to do with Men in Hats, there’s still not a corollary in the country readily springing to mind.
There’s no escaping the fact that the band was taken with technology, dispatching the drummers seat to replace it with a machine to keep time and liberally focusing on synthesizers and keyboards for what might be understood as melodic instruments. All of that works to sit the Calculators in the same arena as the Screamers – but not Dow Jones and the Industrials seeing as those Midwesterners still enjoyed guitars a bit too much.
And if the Screamers are the closest, analogous group that becomes problematic considering the two bands don’t sound similar to anyone spending more than a few minutes with each amassed catalog.
While that Los Angeles based group surely had a dark tinge to its music, the Calculators come off as something far more sinister. Oddly, though both the Aussie group and the Californians covered “The Beat Goes On.” From a quick listen to each version, the Calculators easy present themselves as more dramatically detached from anything approaching pop song structure.
Even in the group’s moments of stringent adherence to structure, as with “Glitter Kids,” there’s so little going on (in a good way) as to make it song sound as if it isn’t comprised of disparate sections. They’re there, though. And while we might not instantly recognize it, as with “Pumping Ugly Muscles’” extraordinarily repetitive middle section, the band working these sounds up in a more persistent vacuum than its State’s side counterparts speaks to not just the Aussie’s imagination, but the source material it reportedly plundered. After a while, it becomes difficult to give Lou Reed and John Cale all the credit.