Last Monday, Melbourne based indie-pop ensemble Architecture in Helsinki, brought their eclectic, multi-instrumental sounds to Camden’s KoKo, home of Europe’s second largest disco ball. Cameron Bird, James Cecil, Gus Franklin, Jamie Mildren, Sam Perry, and Kellie Sutherland have been shaking up the indie scene since 2000 with albums including Fingers Crossed, In Case We Die, and most recently, the huge hit Places Like These.

Monday’s performance featured their unusual but characteristic mix of glockenspiel, Clarinet, Tuba, synths and samplers alongside the usual drums, bass and guitar. From the moment they took the stage, the powerful vocals of both Kellie Sutherland and Cameron Bird, bombarded the audience with an energy that characterised the whole performance. The vocals, drums, tuba, and lively keyboards coupled with the bands colourful kitsch spatterings made for a show that felt like a bottle of cherryade some kid had shaken up and sprayed everywhere for a laugh.

Such stage joviality and excitability made songs such as ‘Debbie’, ‘It’5!’ sound like foot-tapping, head-nodding pieces of pop genius where they perhaps only sound quite good on the records.

The only downfall of what was otherwise a really great show was the fact that the band insisted on a strange interval towards the end, and on returning announced that they would only be playing a couple more songs as they refused to play encores. Now tell me if I’m wrong, but an encore is when the band leaves the stage and returns for a couple more songs? Sounds like you played an encore to me then Helsinkians! Such behaviour only made the band seem like recent success had gone to their heads and made them a little bit cocky. Their performance however, did feel like they had something to be cocky about so on this basis, I will forgive them.

A bonus of the evening for me came from support band Caribou. It is not often that a support band feel like much more than a nuisance you have to accept whilst waiting for what you have paid to see, but Canadian four-piece Caribou proved an exception to this rule. The mixture of psychedelic guitars and the powerful, rhythmic beatings of not one, but two drummers was both intriguing and exciting.

The evening then, was a high energy, uniquely performed mixture of psychedelia and kitsch indie pop, getting two very enthusiastic thumbs up from me!

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