Architecture in Helsinki

The Australian collective is back, making the kind of baroque pop grooviness that kids, hipsters and music professors enjoy. While tracks like "Like It Or Not" and "Hold Music" recall artier '80s new wave such as the Talking Heads and XTC, "Red Turned White" could be appreciated by more open-minded hip-hop producers. Listening to Places Like This all the way through can be sonically exhausting, but if you take it a track at a time, everything flies. Architecture in Helsinki never let their Zappa/Residents-style weirdness turn into Zappa/Residents-style hatred of humanity.

What happens when indie-prog miniaturists decide to go for the long bomb? "Heart It
Races," if they're lucky -- the Australian twee-dweeb aesthetes devise a real pop song
even trippier than the fake ones they keep snapping into fragments, a spaced-out bit of
calypso crossed with dance hall that keeps getting bigger until it finally floats away. With its
sexed-up beats, cowbell, nonsense chants and wigged-out Casio-keyboard psyc... More >