Island brings progressive orchestral sounds
Pallett’s latest release shows complexity while continuing in his known style
Island
Owen Pallett | Secret City Records
Six years since his last acclaimed release, 2014’s In Conflict, Owen Pallett returns with a new set of music. Released quickly and with little fanfare, Island was serviced to media under strict embargo as though it was something people would be rushing to nick.
There is some justification for Pallett’s approach. Since winning a Grammy Award for his work arranging for Arcade Fire, the musician has been commissioned by some of the biggest names in almost every genre of contemporary music, ranging from Frank Ocean and the National to Christine and the Queens and Taylor Swift. His talents are featured on the Oscar-nominated Spike Jonze film Her. Pallett also won an Emmy for Fourteen Actors Acting.
Somewhere amid that seemingly endless list of contracts, he wrote 16 new tracks all loaded with the lush orchestrations and art-song settings his music has inhabited that caught people’s ears when he recorded as Final Fantasy and won a Polaris Prize in 2006 for the album He Poos Clouds. His music has grown a great deal since that far less complex recording.
Here are five things to know about Island:
1. Paragon Of Order. By the third track on the album, it’s clear that Pallett is positioning his new music firmly in an orchestral progressive rock milieu. As he muses on the fact that the child of a broken home can love anyone, jazzy drums pulse, string sections rise and flow and then an almost baroque horn section blows in and out. It’s both breathy and folky, and anyone who loves music such as Denmark’s Efterklang or Iceland’s Sigur Ros will be instantly enamoured. Perhaps Pallett is Canada’s selection for Nordic melancholic orchestral pop in the global arena.
2. Folky vocals. At some point, The Sound of The Engines made me think of the late Nick Drake. Pallett’s voice is a great deal stronger and boasts a greater range, but there is something of Drake’s sad distraction coming across in lines such as I will see the graves/i will see the graves/of your children. Did I mention his music isn’t exactly smile-inducing?
3. Polar Vortex. For all his orchestral chops, Pallett can also do a lot with less. This song is a perfect example with nothing more than guitar, harp and snare drum driving the song along until a solitary muted trumpet blows and the strings ever so briefly bow in. He could probably perform this solo on his violin if need be.
4. Instrumental snippets: There are periodic instrumental snippets dispersed throughout the recording that strongly suggest that Pallett could do a Bryce Dressner (the National) classical score sometime soon. His style is modernist with more than a little tendency toward flourishes best described as cinematic. Lovely, actually.
5. A Bloody Morning. If any song on the album could be a single, it’s probably this noisy, forward track. It’s got a great gloomy bass section drop that sounds totally ominous, but is juxtaposed against a driving beat and quite upbeat melody line in the vocal. The choral break at the 2:40-minute mark stands out. The only thing is how to shorten almost six minutes down to the mandatory digestible single format favoured by radio today. Or not.
Aksak Maboul
Figures | Crammed Discs
This experimental act originally formed in 1977 by Belgian label Crammed Discs founder Marc Hollander has long enjoyed legendary outsider status among fans of the fringes of European art/prog rock. Both of the band’s previous releases are sought after avantpop classics, and now the band is back with its first new release since 1980. The double album, 22-tune release is a welcome arrival to the band’s catalogue. Loaded with off-kilter rhythms, arrangements that sound like they should accompany a very weird dance piece and lengthy jams, such as Taciturne pairing harpsichord jams against heavier mutant metal instrumentation, this is a total ride. The lead single, Tout a une fin/everything ends, is one of the most straightahead tunes, so be ready for a fun ride.
Archie Shepp, Raw Poetic, Damu the Fudgemunk
Ocean Bridges | Redefinition Records
Take a jazz titan and a couple of jazz-centric hip-hoppers and put them in a studio together to improvise over live jazz, hip-hop and more for a session that hits hard. Shepp’s nephew is acclaimed underground rapper Raw Poetic and conceived of this project for a long while. But saxophonist Shepp was reticent to get involved until he felt his nephew was “ready.” What results is an album that throws back to such spoken word and improv-blending genius releases as Shepp’s Attica Blues, with Professor Shepp’s Agenda snippets placed throughout the 15 tracks. The Archives
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Kamasi Washington Becoming | Young Turks Recordings
The soundtrack to the Netflix documentary about Michelle Obama might not be the first place one would expect Los Angeles composer Washington to turn his talents to, but his score for Nadia Hallgren’s film is completely in his wheelhouse. From the slightly backward-referencing title theme with its ’70s sitcom style grooves to the breathy blues of Song For Fraser with its almost Coleman Hawkins/lester Young-esque sax line, this is one of those soundtracks you could put on at a dinner party and carry through the whole night.