Final Fantasy Owen Pallett at Sled Island 2009 (photo by Charles Gunn )

Dearest readers

In this week’s issue I wrote a review of the new Owen Pallett record Heartland. If music editor Peter had let me I would have written another 1000 words about this record. Here are a few nuggets:

1. This is Owen’s first record on Domino a much bigger label than his previous home (Toronto’s Blocks Recording Club.) This might have something to do with the name change. However the promo copy that I reviewed (it still says "Final Fantasy"–collectibles 4tw) was stamped with "FOR GREAT JUSTICE" and the liner notes included a link to this site .

Do you recognize the style? For those of you who aren’t as well-versed in Early 00s Memes 101 it’s a line from the "All Your Base" video .

Of course Final Fantasy was a reference to the classic (and ongoing) Squaresoft RPG series of the same name. Since it seems as though For Great Justice is little more than a shell company for releasing this record maybe this is a reassuring wink from Owen to fellow nerds who dug on his vintage gaming nerdery?

In any case awesome.

2. As suggested in the review I spent quite a while listening to the record and poring over the lyric sheet. One thing that struck me as super interesting (but WAY beyond the scope of a short review) was the Mephistopheles stuff. I am not by any means an English lit expert but I spent some time looking into this and I think there’s some real meaty imagery at work. Check out the relevant Wikipedia page .

What I zeroed in on was the fact Owen’s relationship to Lewis in Heartland has obvious parallels to that between Mephistopheles and Faustus in Marlowe’s play. According to some critical analysis in the above article there is a strong undercurrent of homosexual tension in Doctor Faustus

It makes me think that a conversation with Pallett on the subject would be extremely informative and rewarding.

3. For me the big story with this record is that he actually managed to pull it off. There have been two Final Fantasy shows in Calgary in the past year one at Sled Island and one this fall at Knox United and in both cases Pallett trotted out a healthy amount of Heartland material. My impression was that the songs sounded like they had the potential to be pretty good but they were getting muddled on the way out. He was playing them fast and loose and they sounded a bit sloppy especially compared to the super-tight versions of his older songs. At one point I think he even quipped that he was going to try something super hard—it may have been the pizzicato loop in Midnight Directives— and he wasn’t sure if it would sound good. It was OK but I knew it could sound so much better. After both shows I remember saying to some friends “That sounded OK but if he manages to pull it off in the studio it’s going to be a mind-blowing album and he will be the first two-time Polaris winner.”

Well he did. And it is. Will he win the 2010 Polaris? Who knows. I can tell you one thing: he has a damn good chance of being #1 on my ballot.

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