Wild At Heart

Outside of the four-guy guitar band, there isn’t a pop music line-up that’s sturdier or more iconic than the boy-girl synth-pop duo. Whether it’s Yaz or Eurhythmics, Swing Out Sister or Johnny Hates Jazz, or any of the numerous one-hit wonders best remembered for rounding out forgotten mix-tapes, the combination of a mousy pop genius (usually the boy) and an outgoing and brassy singer (usually the girl) has been good for dozens of seductively catchy songs. It’s not important that the boy and girl are sleeping together; in fact, it’s better that they don’t. But there’s still something undeniably sexy about this gender-and-tech-specific set-up. “Every time I have a crush on a woman … I imagine the two of us as a synth-pop duo,” rock critic Rob Sheffield once wrote, and you can hardly blame the guy.

It’s premature to put Lookbook in the company of the great boy-girl synth-pop duos, but the Minneapolis group has the formula down cold: Grant Cutler provides an icy bed of swooshing keyboards, pulsating beats, and clanging guitars, and Maggie Morrison supplies the powerhouse vocals that humanize the frosty hooks. On Lookbook’s winning debut, Wild At Heart (which is being released on Milwaukee label Listening Party and celebrated with a show Saturday at Cactus Club), Cutler and Morrison make being hung-over, alone, and broken-hearted sound almost romantic on songs like the anthemic “True To Form” and “Free Your Man,” which hurtles forward with a coke-addled throb. Thankfully, Lookbook’s retro-isms don’t overwhelm the emotional content of the songs, which for all their vintage mid-’80s touches still seem very much set in the cold, hard morning-after light of the present tense.