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Architecture In Helsinki send their debut long-player, ‘Fingers Crossed’, out into the world on Monday February 10th.
Straddling indie, electronic and pop genres with winning ease (sometimes within the one song), Architecture In Helsinki draw upon disparate musical influences to create a new, distinctive sound that’s as exciting as anything to tiptoe from your woofers and tweeters
this summer.
If ever there was a way you could link post-acid Beach Boys, preinsanity Prince, Burt Bacharach, The Tom Tom Club, Penguin Cafй Orchestra and Peter Hook, somewhere at the end of it all you mayvery well find Architecture In Helsinki.
Architecture in Helsinki is a six-piece of like-minded types based in and around Fitzroy, Melbourne. Members Cameron Bird, James Cecil, Isobel Knowles, Jamie Mildren, Sam Perry and Kellie Sutherland began colluding musically in the depths of winter 2000.
Spending their first year sporadically rehearsing, swapping instruments and occasionally playing live, the band began recording their album close to two years ago.
The band recorded the album by themselves at a number of locations in both the city and the country – in such unlikely places as beach houses, abandoned church halls, flash recording studios, hallway stairs and student bedrooms.
The list of instruments played on the album reads like that of a wayward school band: synths, guitars, bass, glockenspiel, drums and percussion, trumpet, tuba, trombone, clarinet, recorder, handclaps, finger clicks, kids voices and crowd shouts.
Reflecting the diverse influences and inspirations of each band member, the tracks embrace live instrumentation and electronic wizardry, delicately threaded together in a fashion that is fresh and inspired in its production and (de)construction.
Across fourteen tracks, ‘Fingers Crossed’ plays with notions of pop and non-pop. Ideas are plucked out of one genre and placed on top of one another; songs start in one place and end somewhere else entirely.
Somewhere amongst it all, the band have managed to eek out a sound that is unmistakably and entirely their own.
The album kicks offs with the synth-pop fizz of ‘One Heavy February’. ‘Souvenirs’ is all longing and running away, the urgency of the bass guitar line running towards a swelling synth brass breakout. ‘Imaginary Ordinary’ opens with glitch-electronica, pops,
clicks and whirrs and looped clarinet reflect the wonder of Cameron’s first sighting of fireflies in a forest in New Jersey State ("I had heart palpitations for a week").
‘Scissor Paper Rock’ is an easy drunken sway though a new take on 60s pop. ‘To and Fro’ is deconstructed pop; crumbled up and put together again. ‘Spring 2008’ is largely instrumental; says Cameron "We wanted to make the soundtrack for a future spring… one
which the next generation of new born pigeons could be nodding their heads to".
The next four songs lean more towards the left-field pop arena. ‘The Owls Go’ is a multi-part, upstairs downstairs ditty. ‘Fumble’ and ‘Kindling’ could almost be (whisper it) total-anthem radio pop.
The lead track and first single ‘Like A Call’ is warm, tremulous and laden with anticipation: "A love song dressed up in a busy weekend before the first time I flew in a jumbo jet" says Cameron.
‘Almost a Trap’ exploits its Shadows like guitar line, belying a Bonnie and Clyde romance for a lovesick adolescent growing up in the 50s. ‘City Calm Down’ builds and swells to a blissful string outro. ‘Where You’ve Been Hiding’ is an intimate 80’s era power ballad in Sheep’s clothing.
The album concludes perfectly with the grandiose ‘Vanishing’, dreamy in a mesmeric way to a fade out and, after some 37 minutes, you’re back in the real world.
Do the Whirlwind
http://s65.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=0CDPPKN4HBD143MM8VZO2DI91G
Tiny Paintings
http://s43.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=2229FNVF4BRPP2TWOC1QK61R2L
The Owls Go
http://s43.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=0PW42EOGU8NEQ2UP9M5P3R2KYL
Souvenirs
http://s50.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=0QSCPF0RS5BJO3TZRFUPPRMRZ1