Architecture in Helsinki are an octet hailing from Melbourne on a mission to pepper your ear drums with the finest indie pop that will make you do the whirlwind, whatever that may be. Three albums in with the fabulously playful Places Like This just released this spring. They have succeeded in fashioning a sound full of eccentricity, combining the stranger spectrum’s of indie rock with the simplicity of pop. This is a band not only intelligent but also frolicsome who are well worth splashing out a few bob of your hard earned cash on.

So what are we to make of these antipodean pop stars? I had the wonderful opportunity to speak to the uber friendly and charming Kellie Sutherland. Just like the band she eschews normality. “I’m a modern day musical gypsy” Kellie happily pronounces when I mention what must be the travails of being in a band these days with constant touring and push and pull between concert venue and recording studio. “I got rid of all my stuff. I pretty much have what’s in my suitcase and a few boxes of records and CD’s and books in my family’s storage space” she says with a friendly smile. “It’s quite liberating. You should try it!” Em, I don’t know. Does one not long for the comforts of home, the feeling of “Damn! My favourite sweater’s in Melbourne and I am in San Fran!” but Kellie is resolute. This is a woman changed by touring and the relative ease of modern day travelling. “It has really changed my mind about looking at things and how much impact I was making on the earth. I said to myself ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe I have accumulated this stuff to begin with!” So there you go folks, touring is good for the soul and the environment. I’m not sure it is the life for me.

Constant touring and experiencing new environments and cities has over the course of time slowly changed the dynamic and style of the band. Change is definitely the correct term to use to describe the last two years, especially the time between the most recent album and the one prior to it, the strangely named In Case We Die. A change of scenery for some band members-the vibrancy and cacophony of Brooklyn for lead singer and songwriter Cameron and Kellie, well, all over the place, have brought about a shift in direction for the band. This has enamoured the band with new fans but also alienated one or two who feel the new, more pronounced electro sound anathema to them. So has this new environment aided the new shift in style? “Definitely the intensity of the environment in Brooklyn had a huge impact on how Cameron wrote the songs and being away from home changes the way you think about recording” Kellie tells me.

With band members strewn across the world it seemingly brings up the question of how does one record an album together? If Cameron’s in America, the rest of the band in Australia and Kellie somewhere between San Fran and Mumbai can a band actually work separately? It seems you can and Architecture in Helsinki are testament to that. So how does one do I? “We wrote songs without actually playing them together”. Odd….”It sounds like a really strange concept but it kind of worked for us and the record. If Cameron hadn’t moved then we were at risk of making the same album and that was the last thing we wanted” So how was this done I ponder. “We wrote the songs and demos and sent them over instant messenger and we would have meetings once a week online and talk about ideas and swop ideas and piece together songs” Ah the wonders of modern technology!

The change continued into the recording and producing fields of the album Places Like This. “Cameron had this world drum machine which could make loops and I think just one or two synths. The initial demos that turned into songs really infiltrated how the band sounded. We didn’t have horns as melody makers as in the last two albums” So it seems we have found the origin of this progression to a more electro sound. “We have been touring for quite a few years” Kellie continues. “We did the first two albums ourselves. (Fellow band member) Gus did a lot of engineering. On this last record we had our own engineer and the pace that we recorded was a hundred times quicker. Our ideas and how we expressed them were really turned quickly into reality. It was pretty amazing!”

So a new lease of life and experience into an already lively and intelligent band augur well for the future of Architecture in Helsinki. So I bid adieu to Kellie as she continues on her worldwide tour and look forward to the next musical instalment from Melbourne’s finest.

Conor O'Neill is a winetaster and former Buenos Airen, studying History and Politics in Trinity.
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