“To this day, I frustrate the hell out of my bandmates, because I’m the only person who doesn’t know how to read, write, or notate music at all,” says Cameron Bird, founder and main songwriter of the genre-defying Architecture in Helsinki.
“I’ll be writing songs, and someone will say, ‘What note is that?’ or ‘What key is that in?’ and it doesn’t mean anything to me at all. I only learned which string was which on the guitar over the last two years,” he laughs.
“It definitely affects the way I write. I like working at home and writing on the computer, and a lot of the ways that I write songs is very visual. Not having the idea of how to structure songs in a trained or learned way, I try to write visually.”
For anyone who has listened to the Melbourne sextet’s two full-length releases, such an explanation seems entirely apt. Delightfully free of formula or artifice, those albums – 2003’s Fingers Crossed and 2005’s In Case We Die – introduced the world to the rare pop band whose music was as joyfully free
of pretense as it was loaded with ingenious pop hooks and genre-blending songcraft. After all, if you don’t know the rules, you can’t help but break them.
The only member of the band living outside of Australia, Bird encountered a new set of problems with writing and recording Places Like This, the album that announces the next phase in the band’s development from twee-psych party band to dizzying prog-pop auteurs. Now in New York City and a world apart from his bands, Bird had to find a way to collaborate closely with band members he’d never see face to face.
“I was writing a lot last summer,” he recalls, soft-spoken and friendly on a snowy morning in early April. “Every day I’d get up and turn out songs. I was living above a laundromat, and it was a 100-degree New York summer. It was like living in an oven, and it totally affected the way songs came out. I would send all the ideas and sketches and stuff to everyone, and they’d send it back, and we’d just bounce it back and forth that way.”
By October, the band was done with making an album over IM and e-mail and ready to get back together in the flesh, figuring out how to play the songs live for a month-long tour and preparing them for a two-week recording session.
“When you manage to get a group of white kids in Arizona to dance, there’s something to be said for that.” – Cameron Bird
“I guess there’s a lot less studio nonsense and more focus on being a live band, whereas in the past we had been more of a studio product because that was the way that we worked, everyone being in Melbourne and everyone having home studios and working at each other’s houses. This time, I guess because of the distance, everything was a lot more focused. When we got together, it was like, ‘Ok, we have these songs.’ They were kind of born as live songs in the end, and the album is really different. I guess on the recording, it was recorded live, and it has a really different energy. It’s more energetic and has more of a tight-rock-machine feel.”
To what that roughly translates is an album that is posited at the intersection between indie pop and dance music, with Bird’s love of Latin percussion adding a distinctive rhythmic flavor.
“They’re totally melodic still, but there’s definitely more of a groove there. We’ve always had that lingering over the surface but now it’s probably more pronounced,” he explains.
“As a whole, it’s probably a lot more dance-orientated. I guess we all listen to a lot of dance music, whether it is like reggaeton or house or disco. At the center of it all, we totally love pop music and the song, and as we’ve grown as a band playing the last few years live, we’ve gotten a lot more into the more upbeat and dance-orientated numbers in the set. Just the energy that there would be in the room – we got more into that as a live band, just wanting to have that energy.
“I feel like if you can make people dance, especially in America or Australia or parts of Europe, it’s not something that’s widely embraced or ingrained from your birth like it is in other cultures. When you manage to get a group of white kids in Arizona to dance, there’s something to be said for that. At the moment, I think we’re moving in that direction. And Latin percussion is something that we’re all super into.”
Of course, life in a band is never quite so simple, and Places Like This is also the first release without longtime members Tara Shackell and Isobel Knowles in the fold. And though their departure was amicable, Bird is quick to suggest that the band they left in the summer of 2006 is no longer the band Architecture in Helsinki is today. Despite living in separate hemispheres, the remaining six members are on the same page more than ever before.
“The band existed for quite a few years before Tara and Isobel joined the band, but it just so happens that the time when the band became more known was the time they were in the band, so I guess from my perspective them being in the band was a certain time and a certain sound. And that sound and the way we worked as a band – we’ve been moving away from that a lot over the last year.
“It just seemed like a natural progression to embrace the new direction. The process was totally different in that we are now a band where we all sit in a room and play and everyone has ideas, whereas before it was finding parts for people to play. Now, more than ever, we’re a band,” he says, his tone brightening with satisfaction as he laughs. “Now it’s more a case of getting in the rehearsal room and everyone getting excited and sweaty.”
– Matt Fink