The Icypoles
My World Was Made For You is the debut album from The Icypoles, four girls who call Melbourne home but would just as easily fit into a Bande à Part dance scene or be happily serving cherry pie at Twin Peaks’ Double R Diner*.
Produced by Haima Marriott (Architecture in Helsinki), My World Was Made For You is a collection of thirteen taut tunes to take you through a lover’s landscape of playful celebrations, pensive reflections and dreamy feelings.
With heart bedazzled on sleeve, The Icypoles revel in the fun and fertile relationship zone bookended by flirting and commitment: ‘Staying Home’ laments a smitten crushee’s love-drunk inability to leave the house, whereas ‘Settle Down’ sobers things up somewhat and provides the pragmatic ultimatum, “Our lives together will have to wait for the right time”. ‘Babies’ goes one step further, pondering the cycle of life, and may well be the most startlingly earnest thing to happen to pop music since The Shaggs hatched their Philosophy of the World.
Having become a familiar fixture on Melbourne’s inner-north stages, and with two previous releases (2009’s Getting Ready cassette and 2011’s Promise to Stay 7″ EP), The Icypoles’ musical adventures can be traced back to the early 00s, with half the band finding their formative footing playing horns in Architecture in Helsinki.
Eschewing that band’s off-the-wall maximal approach, however, The Icypoles set raw sentiment to the most bare-boned of arrangements: clear, wistful female vocal harmonies give way to playfully crafted bass, guitar and percussion interplay, like if Phil Spector were stripped of his Wall of Sound and started producing Marine Girls 45s.
