Architecture In Helsinki
Places Like This
(Polyvinyl Records, 2007)

When Architecture in Helsinki’s last album, In Case We Die, came out in 2005 the big revelation about the six-piece, day-glo, chamber-pop maximalists was that, despite the Scandinavian implications of their name, they actually hailed from the opposite corner of the world—Melbourne, Australia. This time around, with their new album, Places Like This, the band’s location is still an issue, however, now the effect of the location is more than just semantic. Around the middle of 2006, the band’s singer and primary songwriter, Cameron Bird, packed up his gear and headed over to New York City, where he wrote the songs that appear on the album. The interesting thing here is that, while Bird was camping out in the Big Apple, the rest of his band was still down under. It was in this situation that the band created this album… and it shows, but not in a way that’s immediately obvious.

One would think that this sort of songwriting arrangement would lead to the songs being relatively disjointed, however, Architecture in Helsinki’s previous efforts were nothing if not a celebration of the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink aesthetic of the Fiery Furnaces, where no idea is too clever to be discarded after about 30 seconds for something completely different. Sending digital song fragments back and forth across the world fundamentally shifted the music from being able to quickly change from one genre to another, which is often a result of the back and forth chemistry of playing in the same room with the rest of the band, to a piecemeal approach to song construction where every aspect of each song is carefully selected and placed into the mix. As a result, grooves last longer, things are given time to breathe, and occasionally the disparate musical ideas the band throws out with reckless abandon coalesce into song structure verging on the traditional.

When it works, it’s a barrel of monkeys, like on the standout track “Heart it Races”, where a Reggaeton beat mixes with melodic lines pounded out on steel drums until everything falls back to make room for a reverb-heavy trance-out chorus. What really makes this song is that each part slowly starts to blend together until the song climaxes with a seamless mix of virtually every sound that’s been played for the last three minutes. It’s a really great moment and it’s a shame that the rest of the album fails to reach the same heights.

The problem with most of the album is that, while individual parts of songs are memorable, like the scatted chorus in “Debbie” or the funky hook in “Hold Music”, it’s rare that these individually memorable parts ever merge into something that is greater than, or even equal to, a sum of its parts. This, regrettably, can be traced back to the all-over-the-world circumstances of the record’s construction. Much of it is fun but forgettable. Yet the occasionally magical flourishes of cohesion simply beg the question: what could have happened if the entire band was in Australia during the composition of the songs? Heck, what if they were all in Helsinki? 

Listen: “Red Turned White” [at myspace.com]