A crisis of Chinese proportions

QUICK! IT’S A CRISIS! WE NEED TO FEED THE HUNGRY SOULS WHO CRAVE NEW WAVE!

What’s a recipe that is repeated over and over yet always sounds pretty good? A certain kind of new wave pop song, which has the follow­ing for its ingredients:

• Gated drum — check
• Synth-vibe-glock sound — check
• Dreams of a far off land that doesn’t exist but actu­ally does
  exist some­where near Merseyside — check

• click: China Crisis — Greenacre Bay

Thanks to the Aaron Aiken for intro­du­cing me to this song. I had previ­ously writ­ten off most of the band China Crisis here­to­fore, but the synths in this song pre-date the late 1980’s sound of the Cure by, well, most of the decade.