Owen Pallett
In Conflict
[Domino Records]
I am head-over-heels about Owen Pallett’s music, but feel his resolutely arch streak keeps him from creating an album that is totally loveable all the way through. Sure, I’ve marvelled at the subtleties of I’m Afraid Of Japan or Oh Heartland, Up Yours! but there’s a nagging feeling that each album in his canon will be spiked with these caustic fragments. That he’s a Xiu Xiu’s devotee partially explains this.
Pallett similarly has a propensity to undermine his feelings: He Poos Clouds’ Torontonian woes were woven through Dungeons and Dragons imagery, while the self-aware self-doubt of Heartland was set in the fictional land of Spectrum, where rebel farmer Lewis warred with his creator/god named Owen. Each was knowingly part-ridiculous, using these contexts to deflate the intensity of emotion underneath the filigree of violin lines and endearing melodic turns.
Pallett’s lyrics are still at times unapproachable, but In Conflict feels like, by a distance, his most emotionally direct album. This is conveyed through stark lyrical outbursts (“I’ll never have any children/I’d bear them and eat them”, “You stand in a city that you don’t know any more/Spending every year bent over by the weight of the year before”), the tone of his voice (the title track) or the bombast of the arrangements (The Riverbed), all part of an album Pallett claims was about “depression… but not in a dark, wallowy way, [a] celebration of the beauty of mental instability, glorious manic state, etc.” Truly spectacular. – IL
See also: OMD – Dazzle Ships; Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca; Xiu Xiu – A Promise
Words: Ian Lamont
