Baby when we get older
We don't have to get colder.
— Architecture in Helsinki, "In Case We Die (Parts 1-4)"
Early in the morning, while beginning the hour-long drive to my 8-5
job, hearing Architecture in Helsinki's "The Owls Go" play on the
usually dull college radio station was enough to change the color of
my day completely. That song, off the Australian indie-pop group's
1993 debut album Fingers Crossed, is like a fountain of youth:
an exuberant cross between a campfire song and a nursery rhyme, with
thumb piano, melodica, and trombone. But Cameron Bird, a sensitive
soul with an unusual voice, sings the song like his heart is full of
hurt, and a few of the band's female members chime in with sweetly
comforting and at the same time strange backing vocals about "a knife
serrated". The song kicks off with a whispered countdown, and it feels
like someone's secret party, like somewhere there is a place where
outcasts from mainstream society make strange and beautiful noises
with the glee of children, without caring how much money the music is
worth. Even the grayest Michigan sky looked sunny with that song
playing over the car stereo, even the most tedious job could fade away
from memory quickly...
The bulk of Fingers Crossed was less spunky, more gentle
than "The Owls Go", yet just as inventive. The music –- driven by
synthesizers, acoustic guitars, assorted percussion, and a choir of
voices –- fell somewhere between quiet folk, '50s pop, '80 new wave,
the output of a runaway marching band, and a musical interpretation of
a Dr. Seuss book. The eight musicians and their guests played with the
freedom of children who haven't yet learned how they're supposed to
behave. Yet it was seriously creative music, with lyrics that weren't
just joyous but also strange and sad and enigmatic.
Still, Fingers Crossed was too delicate and sweet (too
"twee") for the tastes of contemporary tastemakers. It was easy for
some to dismiss the music as insubstantial, because Architecture in
Helsinki weren't grabbing you by your collar or yelling in your ears.
With their audacious, rambunctious second album, they've ensured that
people will pay attention. Love it or hate it, In Case We Die
is an album that's not easy to ignore.
On In Case We Die, Architecture in Helsinki have taken each
element of their music and amplified it. On every song they sound
driven to push their music to its furthest logical extremes -– to make
the theatrical more theatrical, the fanciful more fanciful, the sad
sadder –- and embrace whatever the result is. These songs are bigger,
louder, and wilder, with more dramatic flourishes, more
genre-crossing, more time changes, more convergences of a junkyard's
full of diverse musical instruments, more catchy hooks, more songs
subdivided into parts like mini-musicals, more moments where they yell
out like giddy schoolchildren, and more songs where they sound like,
to quote Smokey Robinson, they've got to dance to keep from crying.
The music on In Case We Die is, on the surface, undeniably
child-like. The lyrics hover near the realm of nonsense, the overall
sound is bright and sunny, and the musicians play a cornucopia of
instruments -– synthesizers, guitars, horns, strings, percussion,
samplers, "hand and power tools", etc. -– as if they're still in awe of
the very concept of sound, in love with the fact that you can pick
something up and make a noise with it.
Yet there's a surprising tone of somberness to the album too. For
every propulsive drum or aggressively happy chant there's a sad segue
or tender guitar playing. And from the album's first sounds –- funeral
bells ringing -– on to its last, the theme of human mortality is
everywhere. With references to reincarnation, cemeteries, guns, and
ghosts, nearly every song contains a reminder that we can die at any
time. This gives even the giddiest of songs a bittersweet tone,
expressing the feeling that we need to dance and sing and love and
mess around with crazy instruments now, because it might be the
last chance we have.
In Case We Die starts off sounding much like Fingers
Crossed, but performed with more urgency: faster, tougher, and
with a dose of lusty, animalistic energy. By the fourth song, they're
really getting down to business, shaking up their already eclectic
music even more. "Wishbone" has both a goofy Grease-like motion
to it and melancholy strings, but also the tendency to fade into a
tropical daze before bouncing back into step. As the album progresses,
more attention is paid to groove and beat, to getting you to dance
your ass off like the world's about to end. On "Do the Whirlwind", for
example, the band sounds like a 21st century Tom Tom Club, but with
church choir tendencies. In Case We Die is a party album,
though depending on how open-minded your guests are, it could be
eccentric enough to drive half the people at your party absolutely
batty.
Throughout In Case We Die, the simplest songs have the
tendency to explode with color and light. Like Of Montreal, Belle and
Sebastian (these days), Bearsuit, P:ano, Tilly and the Wall, and
others, Architecture in Helsinki are sexing up pretty pop songs and
taking them to a new level. They're annihilating expectations of
"indie-pop" as a style of music, confounding the notion that sweet and
sensitive pop songs are necessarily small and insubstantial. They're
proving that a gentle, humble little pop song can also be surprising,
intricate, and as big and bright as a golden-age Hollywood epic.
In the liner notes, the band acknowledges that they don't know how
to define what they're doing by conventional standards, thanking the
album's contributors for "helping us make it what it is. Whatever that
may be..." The ambiguity in their intentions is perhaps what makes them
so easily erase the lines between genres, and jump over boundaries.
It's like they're keeping themselves from being restrained by any
notions of what a pop song should sound like. That freedom to push
things to extremes is what makes In Case We Die such a thrill
ride. They're taking pop music in new directions by letting their own
creative impulses take hold.
On In Case We Die Architecture in Helsinki are also using
their music to gently demolish the dividing line between childhood and
adulthood. The sort of free imagination displayed on these songs –-
plus the basic sound of their music overall –- fits more with societal
notions of childhood than adulthood. Yet the emotional weight inherent
in the album's themes of life and death, the imaginative
genre-crossing, and the complicated song structures resist the notion
that this music is childish, and therefore insignificant by adult
standards. This music is childish and significant. Like most of
the best artists, they understand what's lost in 'growing up', and do
their best to keep it.
— 19 May 2005
