Owen Pallett – Heartland

Owen Pallett – Heartland

Formerly recording under the moniker Final Fantasy, Owen Pallet has dropped the homage to classic RPGs, affirming his desire to make it on his own.

Not that he needs to – his orchestral and arrangement work for the likes of Arcade Fire, Grizzly Bear and Last Shadow Puppets already merit more than a few footnotes in modern music history – but allowed to run free with his own ideas Pallett is a gifted composer of elegant modern indie-electro compositions with a classical twist, clashing the analog with the digital, and knowing it‘ll work.

He’s Patrick Wolf without the constant need to scream ‘LOOK AT ME!!’. For though Pallett may be prodigious with an obvious talent in everything he puts his mind though, ‘Heartland’ is not his ego on display for all to see. Instead, it’s a trip through Spectrum – what would be this artist’s Narnia – as Pallett conjures a deistic dialect for Lewis, an inhabitant of this fictional land, contemplating on his aggressions and confusions.

The music reflects the process, beginning with dramatic, but steady stabs of reflection in ‘Midnight Directives’, then coming to the driving assertion of ‘Lewis Takes Action’, developing the lively fantasy of ‘Flare Gun’ and finding epiphany in the ethereal synths of ‘Tryst with Mephistopheles’.

It’s a bold album, attempting to unite old with new, and literature with music, but it works. Remarkable as both a Fantasia-like surreal electro-opera, or 12 songs of cutting-edge North American indie.

7.8/10