Owen Pallett – Heartland
Domino 2010
[tags: indie, orchestral, contemporary fiction, 2010]
Listen while reading:
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There is not much left to say about Owen Pallett’s recent release Heartland and I don’t want to make this post too long for everyone should have heard that the record is in stores now and got much praise from all around the blogosphere. But then I think that Heartland is such a great piece of music, that it seems essential at least to write some words about it.
Even though I knew that there was a band by the name Final Fantasy (Owen Pallett’s former moniker) I never spend much time with its music and so Heartland is some kind of debut to me. And after many hours of listening to it I call this one of the best, if not the best release of January 2010. Overall it took nine months and the superb support of the Czech Philharmonic to record the album wherefore the end product is just awesome both in sound quality and songwriting.
Pallett’s music is mostly characterized by (looped) violin and synthesizer melodies with decent percussions – the recorded version maybe sounds fuller and stronger due to having the Czech Philharmonic in the back, but also on stage Pallett is really great and it is a pleasure to watch him perform as well as to listen to his compositions. The label calls the music contemporary fiction, highly orchestrasded. And I will stick with that even though my first impression was that of a typical indie record with lots of weird synthesizer melodies and even more classical instruments. But however you want to call it, the music speaks for itself and shows its greatness above all tags and classifications.
Along with all the praise I owe to Heartland, it is also one perfect example that the album as a medium is not dead at all – and maybe will never be. The whole conceptualization keeps you prisoner from the beginning to the end and the endless variation of the tracks is sheer overwhelming. I have not listend to such a compact album in a very long time and I think Heartland will have a great impact on the scene, maybe like Of Montreal’s Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? had in its days. Owen Pallett, up yours!
Buy the record directly from Domino and listen to the full album stream by clicking here. Visit Owen Pallett’s MySpace and personal homepage too.
