Kindergarten pop

Architecture in Helsinki’s approach to recording their second full-length album was similar to a kindergarten music class. They field-tripped to a friend’s percussion-instrument-filled garage, cut themselves loose, and then re-grouped to play with their newfound musical toys. The resulting album, “In Case We Die,” was released in April of 2005, and critics have been describing it in every imaginable way -- and several decidedly unimaginable ways -- ever since.

The Australian octet-turned-sextet (Tara Shackell and Isobel Knowles are no longer members of the group) have been compared to everyone from the Fiery Furnaces to the Muppets, and labeled everything from indie dance-pop to the controversial “twee-pop.” Most indie bands react to this term in the same way that most listeners react to Architecture in Helsinki’s wide-eyed, frenetic sound: they either fully embrace it or fervently reject it.

AIH front man Cameron Bird fits into the latter category. “We don’t want to classify our music,” he said on the phone from San Francisco, “It’s unhealthy to pigeon hole.” Bird was rehearsing with the band before launching a U.S. tour with Brooklyn “It” band, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. The tour includes a stop at Avalon tonight.

“In Case We Die,” is the swirling, plucking, chirping follow-up to the band’s 2003 debut “Fingers Crossed” (Trifekta), and they’re currently at work on album number three, to be released in early 2007. The second album is experimental, energetic, and at times dance-worthy, but sacrifices cohesiveness along the way. AIH often takes advantage of their size, utilizing campfire sing-a-long-like vocals whenever possible, perhaps as a unifying thread. “Maybe You Can Owe Me” reveals the logic behind their song building process in layers- cue piano, cue guitar, cue cymbals- but this is completely lost during more chaotic tracks such as “The Cemetery,” which is the musical equivalent of too many cooks in the kitchen.

Ironically, AIH borrows musical elements from fellow unhappily “twee”-termed groups, such as the seminal post-punk trio Beat Happening, and indie-pop Scots Belle and Sebastian. At its core, their music possesses the do-it-yourself ethics of Beat Happening (when Bird makes use of his baritone vocal abilities on “Need To Shout,” it sounds like Calvin Johnson himself), but with an additional forty or so instruments. The child-like, innocently quivering vocal harmonies are signature Belle and Sebastian, but where Belle and Sebastian smile sweetly during their often brooding lyrics, such as on “Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying,” AIH uses words in terms of their sounds. Rhyme, alliteration, and assonance all become instruments, and lyrical meanings are an afterthought in lines such as: “We talk deeper than weather/ baseball cap with a feather/ fire engines here to quell the blaze in our life” (from “What’s In Store?”).

“There are so many people playing, you don’t even hear a lot of they stuff they’re using,” says Matthew Patterson Curry, aka Safety Scissors, a San Francisco-based techno artist. “The first time I saw them live, the dynamics were more apparent and the music made more sense.” Curry recently remixed the “In Case We Die” track “Do the Whirlwind,” for “We Died: They Remixed,” an tour-only release (although tracks are already spreading on the MP3 blog circuit) of AIH remixes by Safety Scissors, Hot Chip and others.

Bird says that live performances are essential to the group’s music-making process. He’s spent the past few months in Brooklyn, while the group’s remaining five members were in Melbourne, Australia, so their third album was put together in high-tech, Postal Service-type form. Lyrics, song clips, and ideas were swapped via e-mail and Instant Messenger, and the week prior to this tour was the first time the group actually played the new material in the same room- an endeavor Bird says is “sort of like building four pyramids at once.”

This is AIH’s second time playing in Boston; the first was in June of 2005, when they crammed a plethora of both instruments and musicians onto the tiny stage at Allston music hub Great Scott. “It was sort of like watching a game of Tetris,” says Carl Lavin, the booking manager who snagged the group for the Great Scott show.

Avalon may offer more space, but can Bostonians expect a similar performance from the group? “No,” says Bird. “We’re always changing the way we work. If we were still playing the same way I’d be depressed.”