Dorks And Losers

You don’t hear many bands com­ing from Aus­tralia these days. Some­how the indie wave seemed to ignore the land down under, but eclec­tic band Archi­tec­ture In Helsinki (AIH) aims to make some­what weird, some­what retro, some­what WTF music with their third album Places Like This.

As with their first two albums Fin­gers Crossed (2003) and In Case We Die (2005), AIH doesn’t take their music too seri­ously and cre­ates very play­ful pseudo-electronic rock. One rea­son why this six-member group can make such orig­i­nal music: they can all play mul­ti­ple instru­ments. While that might not suf­fi­cient cause for such cre­ativ­ity, hav­ing so many instru­men­tal options delim­its the band’s options and thus allows greater freedom.

The result is songs like the open­ing track, which could be the theme song to a mod­ern hybrid of Revenge Of The Nerds and Weird Sci­ence (“Red Turned White”); the ani­mal­is­tic and pagan-sounding “Heart It Races;” or even the track that could be mis­taken for a Mod­est Mouse song (“Lazy (Lazy)”).

AIH exper­i­ments with an R&B and funk sound, and the band man­ages to main­tain a retro tone with­out being nos­tal­gic or obvi­ous. You could fig­ure “Feather In A Base­ball Cap” was meant to cap­ture an above-the-law badass atti­tude, but stag­gers from styl­ized chop­pi­ness. “Deb­bie” is more con­sis­tent, both in terms of 70s-ness and AIH style.

Places Like This plays a very brisk pace and before you know it the album’s over. The musi­cal vari­ety is out­stand­ing, rang­ing from an off-the-wall dance track (“Hold Music” — see video here) to an acid-less psychedelic aquatic adventure ("Underwater") to a more traditional Architecture In Helsinki track ("Nothing's Wrong"). Music is becoming more hybridized all the time, but I don't think any band has as much fun as AIH.

[photo via Hot Bis­cuits]

[photo via Forks And Knives]
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Track list:

1. Red Turned White
2. Heart It Races
3. Hold Music
4. Feather In A Base­ball Cap
5. Under­wa­ter
6. Like It Or Not
7. Deb­bie
8. Lazy (Lazy)
9. Nothing’s Wrong
10. Same Old Innocence

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