When I last checked in with Owen Pallett, his band was still called Final Fantasy and he was playing with the Brooklyn Philharmonic at BAM opening up for a little Brooklyn band called Grizzly Bear. The show was promising, but at times the full orchestra felt a bit bombastic playing against instead of in support of Pallett’s overtly theatrical and melodramatic songwriting. Pallett’s choices for orchestration on record are consistently spot on and his confessional, sometimes nearly whispered vocal stylings were lost at times under the sound of all those loud, lush interments. He was not swallowed alive however and his performance left me in a very hopeful place.
A few months ago Pallett decided to change Final Fantasy’s name to his own and he released a new full length record, “Heartland,” to impressive critical response under his new moniker. This past Thursday night, Pallett played at New York’s Webster Hall to a full but easy to sift through crowd, playing many songs solo and being joined for others on guitar, percussion and vocals by the extremely talented Thomas Gill. Prior to Thursday night I felt myself really liking his new album, but finding it hard to fall in love with as deeply did with his previous full length “He Poo’s Clouds.” I’d realized that the album had an evolved sense of confidence and that it pushed his music forward in terms of both production and conceptual structure. I’d also realized that it contained a beautiful and deft sense of confidence that is unquestionably an improvement from his earlier work, but there was still something that wasn’t clicking. Thursday’s performance however changed all of that for me. The immediacy of the new “Heartland” material in this stripped down setting, with spot on sound and a devoted audience was exactly what I needed to see in order to “get” what I’d been missing.
