Music has a well-documented tendency to take a while to hit. A song you’ve listened to a hundred times with affable disinterest or even outright dislike can jump you in some dark mental alley and bludgeon an inexplicable epiphany out of you; suddenly it’s the only song on your Winamp playlist and the little green light by the loop button is glowing cheerfully. Entire nights can pass like this, until the song’s tattooed across your cerebral cortex and your Audioscrobbler totals look absurd. Granted, sometimes sudden adoration for a song can seem in the morning like the philosophically groundbreaking Post-It notes motivational speakers are always claiming to have left for themselves while stoned: rubbing sleep out of your eyes and uncrumpling yellow paper to read “THERE ARE SEVEN LEVELS” isn’t far from waking up and discovering a half-written “Perfect Moments in Pop” piece on the Wiggles. It says something frightening about music that the latter rarely requires any kind of chemical stimulation.

But it’s nicer, and more common, for your newfound love to stick—which is what happened to me a little less than a year ago with Architecture in Helsinki’s “Maybe You Can Owe Me.”

A lot of people hold a special hate in their hearts for Architecture in Helsinki, and objectively it’s easy to see why: their overflowing roster (eight members) is of questionable necessity; they’re sweet and chirpy and hyperactive and include a chart on the inside front cover of their second album listing all the instruments used on each track, a gesture transformed from cocky rock-god technolust to giggling high-school-band playfulness by mere choice of font; they use a lot of recorders; some of them have beards. In short, they’re twee, and when I bought their album in the summer of 2005 I listened to it almost guiltily, as if something with more spittle and fewer eight-bit music videos would suit me better. But I was in New York City at the time, with no computer and few CDs, and so “In Case We Die” got what I then considered more than its fair share of headphone time. It was this paucity of material, in fact, and nothing else, that accounted for my listening to the album one evening in the 42nd Street subway station, while a southbound train took its sweet time in arriving and “Maybe You Can Owe Me” revealed itself to me.

Tim Ellison’s original Stylus review of In Case We Die mentioned “Maybe You Can Owe Me” halfway down, as “a really nice track with a sort of soft ’80s U.K. new wave sound,” and that’s exactly what it is; but it’s also one of the stranger songs on the album, its langorous, straightforward construction and two-minute outro almost directly opposed to AiH’s usual three-songs-in-one-minute, get-in-get-out approach. (It’s worth mentioning here that the rest of the album, piece by piece, followed “Maybe You Can Owe Me” into my positive estimation, and that the ADD symphony of the title track now thrills me almost as much as it’s supposed to.) It’s a slow, dreamy song, shimmering vocals shoved high in the mix, and it floats for the first minute on an extraordinary sense of anticipation: each verse beginning slowly, the lyrics drawn out, before tumbling into a tangled heap of syllables that push the music closer to the cliff you know it has to drop from. “Counting all the minutes ’till July the First / But you counted all the seconds and it made you feel worse” is rattled off so quickly it would be stressful if there weren’t such a sense of impending glee—a description, one imagines, as appropriate for the song’s subject matter as its music. When things do drop—when the instruments advertised in the liner notes break in, and the line “there’s no way that I’ll sleep when you’re near me” is repeated as the song’s swirling mantra—the listener gulps down great gooey beakerfuls of tonic, and one particular listener who’s been standing strangely frozen on a subway platform, wondering how he could possibly have missed this, decides all at once that he likes Architecture in Helsinki. And because sometimes, as the Honda commercial says, things just work, the moment at which he decides this is also the moment at which the R train comes whooshing into the station, and the song’s slow, airy fade trickles away as he clambers into the subway car. It’s as marvelous a drop as you think it’s going to be, and with luck you’ll feel the same way in the morning.

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