Moment Bends

Architecture in Helsinki’s fourth album ‘Moment Bends’ is best appreciated by leaving your preconceptions at the door, writes SHAUN PRESCOTT.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Architecture in Helsinki has a problem. Or do you? Moment Bends follows the group’s poorly received 2007 record Places Like This, which embodies their dilemma: how does a pop group, zipped up too early in a twee straight jacket, wrestle its way out and present itself as anything but a gaudy confection? Preliminary listens to this new record require some mental gymnastics on the part of anyone familiar with their earlier work. It’s best to take two deep breaths and forget what you think you know about the group.

This isn’t to suggest the band has completely reinvented itself, but it’s fair to say Moment Bends needs to be divorced from its predecessors before it can shine. Nor is this record a retreat into dreary adult sobriety: this is bright and florid pop music that successfully unbolts the shackles that made their previous works so exorbitantly – sickeningly - whimsical. There’s the tenable sense of the human in these songs. Architecture in Helsinki isn’t shy anymore, as Places Like This demonstrated, but now their boldness is justified: they can present potential greys among the fluorescent pastels of their world and thus tug the heart in a myriad different directions.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] Contact High by Architecture In Helsinki

But why does it work now? Because the songs on Moment Bends are unfailingly lovely, an important development for a group that used to sound like the Play School house band. No longer are we relegated to the sidelines while these pixie-like 20-somethings bound carefree through green fields (such as during the clip for ‘It’5’. Architecture in Helsinki has opened up enough to permit us entry into their world, and now we can interact with and identify ourselves in it. It's in the air of benevolent sentimentality that pervades many of the songs here, such as 'Desert Island', where Cameron Bird conflates “a promise land” with a blithe resignation to reality, accepting that one can't exist without the other and that we must move between. Elsewhere, Bird encapsulates the sentimental theme of this record during 'Yr Go To': “Chains are broken and we're living in doubt/It took a sentimental melody to figure it out.” Soft synth arpeggios sweep this track like a searching lighthouse, navigating a path between the bass line shoals.

“‘Moment Bends’ is neither a tribute nor a parody: it's bold, unashamedly sincere, celebratory and thoughtful, nuanced and heartfelt.”

But for all that, 'W.O.W' is the true apogee of Moment Bends, the moment when it's clearest that Architecture in Helsinki is capable of a great deal more than we thought. Kellie Sutherland's lyrics explore a similar theme to Catcall's 'Swimming Pool': a yearning for desire to be substantiated, supported by the way synths waver in the mix immaterially, like alluring potentials. Architecture in Helsinki arrange their songs impeccably, and this is no better demonstrated than during 'W.O.W'. One-off quirks and flourishes are carefully plotted with a landscape painter's attention to detail. Tiny three-note synth lines touch upon choruses before calmly exiting stage left. Each sound is in service of the spine-tingling melancholy this track exudes.

It's not their “becoming adult” that makes Moment Bends a step in the right direction for Architecture in Helsinki. They haven't moved from innocence to experience, but are rather grappling somewhere in-between. There are still moments of uninhibited gaiety here, such as during the infectiously dumb 'That Beep', but it no longer feels like the band is making fun of us, or making fun of pop music. During a time when all manner of mainstream pop moves are being “co-opted” by “indie”, Moment Bends is neither a tribute nor a parody: it's bold, unashamedly sincere, celebratory and thoughtful, nuanced and heartfelt. If you don't like Moment Bends it's not Architecture in Helsinki's problem: it's yours.

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‘Moment Bends’ is out now through Modular Recordings.