Architecture In Helsinki @ TheForum, Melbourne (10/09/2011)

Fri 16th Sep, 2011 in Gig Reviews

Heading along to see Architecture In Helsinki at The Forum, I had so many expectations. The new sounds and ideas at play on this year’s Moment Bends made for a potential ‘Australian album of the year’, but my initial excitement was hard to maintain for the duration of this overly polished performance. Call me crazy, but to me AIH always displayed a kind of juvenile Talking Heads vibe about them. Both bands were never about one particular mode of music, but instead zig-zag through genres like musical nomads, as if settling down was akin to some kind of musical death. Sadly though, this comparison doesn’t extend to the live show offered by AIH tonight. If Talking Heads are any kind of touchstone for AIH, and they do indeed fear being categorised, in concert AIH have more pressing concerns.

The majority of the set tonight is pulled from Moment Bends – plus a few older songs that fit with that album’s overall sound -  and it’s almost a given that the majority of fans here tonight, judging by their reactions to what’s played, got on board around the time 2009 single That Beep emerged.

The band, dressed entirely in white, no doubt gave a large portion of the audience what that had come for, but the niggling feeling that I was just hearing pre-programmed… well everything, was hard to ignore at first, and down-right irritating by the end. All of the dominant parts in the music, and to some degree Cameron Bird’s vocals, seem to be synthetically bolstered and not-very-live-at-all. Current single Escapee, great on-record, could have been playing on an ipod, rather than live by the band that created it.

So the big question is- who on stage was slacking off tonight? Well, nobody, if you judge the band on the physical energy they put into performing these songs. Yet you could equally argue that nobody was working hard here, except for the lighting guy – who did a fantastic job – and the guy with the volume control and the samples key pad. A couple of years ago, Ladyhawke had one of the best albums of out in the new-electronica field, and managed to stage a well balanced show between live and sythnesised music, so it defies reason that a band like AIH – who began as an acoustic act – would leave so much of the work to rather un-dynamic samples.

The show’s encore features a run of popular choices- including It’5, Do The Whirlwind and Heart It Races from older albums- but concludes weakly on Moment Bends’ lack-lustre single, Contact High. This last disappointment was one too many, in a show that I really expected to walk from buzzing with nothin’ but love for AIH.