Owen Pallett, Heartland
[Domino]
Reviewed by: Caspar
Owen Pallett was touring in Barcelona as a member of the Arcade Fire, a few years back, and decided to stay on at a festival where they had been playing, to check out some bands. He failed to find anywhere to stay, however, and so when he got chatting to three friends of mine who were there for the festival, they offered to give him the sofa in their rented flat. I should add that Owen Pallett is a friend of Dorothy, and these three friends of mine are straight. Anyway: nothing happened that night, but in the morning they woke up to find that he had cooked them all scrambled eggs for breakfast. To this day, these (straight) friends of mine argue about which one of them it was that he might have wanted to make whoopee with, on that night when he followed them back to their apartment. “It was me! I caught him staring at me once.” “He complimented me on my hair though!” It’s quite shameful.
I don’t think that anecdote really illustrates anything. I just love the idea of an Arcade Fire band member making me breakfast. It’s really quite adorable, don’t you think? And I suppose if it does illustrate anything at all, it might be that Owen Pallett is a very charismatic, interesting person. Listen to his album Heartland, if you want further proof.
It’s a very exciting record, although probably one that I need to listen to a few more times. It’s so intricate, and thoroughly laden with ornate orchestrations (Pallett is responsible for the strings on the Arcade Fire’s records) and strange lyrics, that I think you need to work at it a bit harder than I already have. I’m pretty certain that it will stay with me for a long time, though – and, like Joanna Newsom’s record Ys (the album it’s been compared with most), it will get better and better with every listen.
Already, though, I love the vocals, which sound very much like another gay aesthete, Arthur Russell, hazy as if sung behind a wall of computers. The orchestrations are a bit like Russell’s, too – very avant-garde and choppy. There is something a little bit distant about the sound of the record; it’s got a sort of refined texture somehow, that initially makes you feel a little alienated. On closer inspection, it is more lovable than that, with warm pianos here, and great scoops of brass crashing about joyfully. Nowhere is this better than on the album opener, ‘Midnight Directives’, which sets up a duel between galloping strings and great honking brass, each fighting the other until the crashing close.
The album’s best song, ‘Lewis Takes Action’, also heaps on the melodrama – but where in Rufus Wainwright’s world the orchestrations are matched by equally soaring vocals, Pallett holds back, with a lovely, breathy, murmury quality to his singing. It nicks a beat from Be My Baby, and is generally terrific. He is playful, too: ‘Keep The Dog Quiet’ begins with the lyric “my body is a cage”, which is a pretty cute allusion to his old bandmates. The song also has some very delightful pizzicato strings, giving it a sort of upbeat, flirty sound somehow.
There’s so much to enjoy here, basically. You have to love the threatening riff on ‘Flare Gun’, and the rococo strings that kick in, as they swirl around and are joined by a choir. It’s the sound of someone with a phenomenal grasp of music seizing his moment. This, he is saying, is what music can do: it’s theatrical, energetic, thoughtful and inventive.
A minor quibble I have with Pallett is that I think he sometimes holds back a bit too much, sometimes is too tasteful. I think he may never be the singer I warm to most, but on this record he fills me with such love and admiration, that may be good enough.
Rating: 85%
