>>PREVIEW
FINAL FANTASY
Sunday, September 17
Liberty Lounge (MRC)
There’s always been a notion of mad genius surrounding Owen Pallett. First grabbing leading man attention as the fragile-voiced front of Toronto’s pummelling Les Mouches (their under-appreciated album You’re Worth More to Me than 1,000 Christians striking the perilous balance between beautiful and downright frightening), Pallett popped-up everywhere, from playing along with The Hidden Cameras, Royal City and The Constantines to finding the time to compose the string arrangements for The Arcade Fire’s almighty Funeral. Casting off Les Mouches to devote more of his time to his true love of Final Fantasy, Pallett’s signature musical power has since struck out in directions challenging our very notions of what makes for indie rock and pop music.
Whereas Final Fantasy’s debut album (besides the CDs Pallett sold at early Final Fantasy shows, often limited editions of only one) Has a Good Home attempted to capture Pallett’s live show mastery of solo violin performance run through sampling pedals and effects, this summer’s He Poos Clouds brought Pallett closer to his classical training. Each song was composed and recorded with string quartet in mind. The one-two punch of the gorgeous classicism of "I’m Afraid of Japan" and the thwacked string rhythm section of "Song Song Song" provide the record’s finest turn, while "This Lamb Sells Condos" treads the same harpsichord/piano pop as Tori Amos’ Boys for Pele with rather grand results.
There’s no doubt Pallett’s a master musician, but his brilliance is kind of like that of the really hot guy in band class who not only plays circles around everyone else in the room, he just sometimes takes himself a bit too seriously to ever let anyone fully inside.
Considering He Poos Clouds’ flirtations with classical composition, Final Fantasy has stuck out as an amazing anomaly in the indie rock scene within which Pallett dwells.
"I think it’s really a pop album to me," Pallett says. "(The record) has classical instrumentation on it, but I was deliberately trying to not make a classical album. Classical music is just recorded in an entirely different way – the performance is so separated from the original."
Still, given Pallett’s training and reputation, it’s natural to suspect some form of straddling two musical worlds, violin in one hand, indie cred card in the other.
"I don’t distinguish between the pop and the classical – it’s the same shit to me. It’s funny, when I was in university people would always be like, ‘Oh, you’re pop,’ and thinking that what I was doing from a classical perspective was not what I was seriously into. On the pop side, people think the reverse is true. Personally, I don’t even think of myself as a polymath in that regard. It’s one of the disadvantages, I guess – people think you’re only half there."
While He Poos Clouds is currently soaking up most of the attention, the Young Canadian Mothers 7-inch EP – arguably Final Fantasy’s best release thus far – leaked out quietly earlier this summer on the small Escape Goat record label. Compiling a trio of Pallett originals (including a lively re-construction of Good Home’s "This is the Dream of Win and Regine") and a cover of Joanna Newsom’s "Peach, Plum, Pear," the tiny Mothers manages to portray more sides of Pallett than He Poos Clouds. Her harp transposed for the plucked strings of Pallett’s violin, his cover of one of Newsom’s best songs stands as a fitting tribute between musical oddballs embraced by the indie underground.
"A girl like her, just yowling her head off about these amazing fantastic things and totally doing it on her own, totally blows me away. I think if I met her, my head would explode," he says.
As for his upcoming solo and collaborative arrangement work schedule, over the course of our short conversation Pallett outlines his dream of founding a "free orchestra" to record four new albums, all while working on arrangements for singer-songwriter Dan Goldman and the Arcade Fire’s upcoming second album.
"It’s pretty cool," he says of working with the indie world’s biggest band. "They send me tracks, I send them arrangements. Sometimes they give me crap and I give them hell. Most of the time it’s pretty easy."
As for any other dream artists he’d like to work with, Pallett’s answer is fast and to the point, "No. Not really anyone. I like what I’m doing."
As to how he maintains such a busy work schedule, he answers simply, "I’m not that much more productive than those people around me, but I don’t smoke pot."
One can only imagine where Pallett will head from here, but he’s not one for wasting time on self-congratulation. Despite his big plans, he casts off the future abruptly.
"It’ll just be the same old shit," he says. "The same old whatever."
No doubt, heads will roll and things will never be quite the same. |
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