by LORRAINE CARPENTER

Outside Cabaret on a Sunday night last October, it was announced that Australian octet Architecture in Helsinki had cancelled their scheduled Pop Montreal show. Amid the dejected chatter, a rumour circulated, something about an exploding van on the other side of the border. Turns out that wasn’t true, but it was a romantic notion about a band that prides itself in taking absurd risks, hurtling across treacherous terrain, tearing through intersections of chamber music, twee pop and new wave. Their majestic strings and brass, smart beats and synthetic frosting, and his ’n’ hers vocal exchanges, all punctuated with giddy spasms, flourish on Architecture in Helsinki’s two albums to date.

“In Case We Die is to Fingers Crossed as Rocky 3 is to Rocky 7,” says band leader Cameron Bird, suggesting that the former, sophomore album isn’t a sequel but an incrementally superior, less ridiculous work. Presumably, the band feels that their best record is yet to come, a career pinnacle to match the original Rocky—but don’t be surprised if they switch metaphorical movie franchises entirely.

Comparing their music to a Stallone vehicle is overly humble anyway. The band’s only punch-drunk attributes, aside from sometimes literally getting drunk on punch, is their songwriting M.O., wherein “confusion reigns supreme,” according to Bird. As band chief, one who was allegedly driven towards musicianship by “a combination of the Australian outback and Billy Ocean,” Bird lords over the crafting of each song, conducted “in random moments of clean-living psychedelic wonder.”

The magic happens at Architecture in Helsinki’s Melbourne HQ, Super Melody World. The studio/clubhouse was recently the site of a particularly stressful recording session of the Beach Boys instrumental “Pet Sounds” for Do It Again: A Tribute to Pet Sounds, out next week on Spanish label Houston Party (fellow contributors include Will Oldham, the Wedding Present and Patrick Wolf).

“We thought there was no way on Earth we could physically do it and even contemplated hiring session players. How do you cover a song off the greatest album ever?”

With the eye of the tiger, of course.

With Clue to Kalo and 33 Hz at la Sala Rossa on
Friday, May 19, 9 p.m., $15

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