Jonathan Richman and Tommy Larkins, 2/26

About 4 or 5 days before performance date, I walked up to the Oberlin student union desk for other business, and I saw Jonathan Richman on the list of names. The name didn't immediately register. I hadn't seen posters. I had to go upstairs and google a bit before the "OH" hit me and I ran back downstairs, slapping down $6 with a shout of "THAT JONATHAN RICHMAN?"

To be fair, I hadn't known about the man, the legend, and his associated Modern Lovers until about a week before. I'd been diving in and listening around after I read an article about a Rte-128 rock pilgrimage in the name of "Roadrunner"; I was amazed to find a man and group of influence and skill based out of, and singing about, the suburbs I came from. Next time we talked, my Dad laughed and told me about the Beserkeley releases he had in the basement. It felt like a world opening up.

A cursory search made me realize the need to reacquaint. "Roadrunner" was first recorded around 40 years ago, and in the time Jonathan has worked extensively doing no-one-can-be-sure-quite-what. It's resulted in a discography that Wikipedia hasn't even a quarter documented. He releases a disk, p4k gives it a good-to-strong review, and everyone goes on their ways. It wasn't the genre or songwriting or the comedy or history that I went down tonight for tonight; I think it was just the man.

The setlist is a blur to my untrained mind, but he got there late with drummer Tommy Larkins, and stepped up to play 10 minutes later. "He looks like a dad" my friend said. No opener, no lagtime. Starting off on his first song he was reading us intently, gently mocking the folded arms of the hipsters, spinning out his observations and experiences. The audience did not know whether or how to applause during the next three songs, all about partying in different languages (Arabic, Spanish, Italian). He was putting down his guitar to play these...jingle bells, honest to god.

He would throw quick changes of tune to Tommy, who held down a quiet and insistent beat structure with occasionally solos. He would invariably reintroduce Tommy, often while wandering away from the mic and inviting everybody closer. Tommy's kit was stripped to ride, crash, bongo, tom and kick, played only with brushes and cluster sticks, but he was effective in supporting and filling every song differently. The sound was like easy-listening except there wasn't anything easy about it. It was impossible to sing along to his changes and disruptions, the flow of the songwriting was constantly disrupted (did I mention the cowbell solo in "Lesbian Bar?" did I mention he played "Lesbian Bar?" did I mention the drum solo and the dance solo? he dances like he's dancing a hundred dances at once and just flows through them), and then an entirely different song would start.

Generally I saw him..."wandering through" gives too little credit to his intention and persistence, and "happening upon" gives too little credit to his ability and wit. He felt his way through, with immense specificity of subject, about the things that he wanted to write amount. I trusted every conclusion and generalization he came to because I trusted his love of small things first. I've seen bands about love who wear only white, I've seen bands about love with politics they think are complete, I've seen bands about love who think they have a message. Jonathan has what he loves. He follows what he wants to write, fast-tempo quiet music in many languages. And he plays them well, he is an honestly fluent guitarist always with a few tricks up his sleeve.

The show ended abruptly, but not disruptively; there had been a 5 minute intermission (perhaps, with a few "thank you"s one of the few traditionally showman-ship things he did) and we were reaching a stopping point...and then there were two encores. The first was offhand request to an increasingly dancy crowd, "Tandem Jump." The second began as an explanation of how encores work and why there wasn't going to be another one, and then he seemed to convince himself and invited Tommy back up. A few requests for "Straight Up" led to a surprising discussion on honesty in songwriting: how the song wasn't intended tongue-and-cheek, how he feels differently now, and doesn't want to play it tongue-and-cheek or without feeling. He instead performed "Door to Bohemia," calling out Boston for the first time and bringing more than a few cheers. He smiled, finished, and opened himself up to the floor.

I watched him start a conversation with a peer about her classes and majors which turned, in her bewilderment, to Confessions of an Economic Hitman. I just asked him about Boston and we nodded at each other about Rte. 109, a southwest-bound route which meets the kind-of-famous 128 not a mile from where I grew up. He does have a serious, even tone offstage, unlike his never-overdone comic range onstage, but the glitter never leaves his eyes.

Throughout: the metaphors that got away from him were just as compelling as the ones he nailed; the emphatic "No!" placeholders he substituted brilliant extensions in their own way. His eyes took us in, considered and offered us; he didn't offer deep secrets or solutions, but parts of his daily life. It was probably the only kind of optimism in music that I've ever found convincing and compelling; it is unwavering but not unshielded, creative but not reductive, humorous but never senseless, broad but not unarticulated. He doesn't hold some kind of non-ironic purity; it's so much more complicated, present than that. Watching Jonathan is watching simple things happen in complicated, compelling ways.  I like the way he treats songs like loose architectures, imperfect, needed to be performed and related to be effective. Hearing it on record was just one facet. It felt like coming home to a tradition that I could be welcome to. And, lucky for all of us, he keeps doing what he does.

Future of the Left @ Grog Shop, Cleveland

Future of the Left
Setlist (rough order):

• Arm Eritrea
• Chin Music
• adeadenemyalwayssmellsgood,
• Beneath the Waves, an Ocean
• Small Bones, Small Bodies
• Sheena is a T-Shirt Salesman
• Manchasm
• Failed Olympic Bid
• You Need Satan More Than He Needs You
• To Hell With Good Intentions
• Robocop 4
• Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues
• Lapsed Catholics + I Trusted You (total 10m20s)

I think it makes sense to start at the end. Just like the final tracks of every mclusky / FotL album thus far, Lapsed Catholics has a little bit of something extra in it. What we read as complexity, as layered meanings, as the depth of the music, lies completely in the intro: when you hear the song cut off from the intro, you're left with an excited 3 (maybe 4) note melody with inspiringly uninspired structure. And it can just keep going, like "I Trusted You" just keeps going. It's a massive joke of media, something that postmodern theorists could dismantle than I could. The onstage antics (I remember little except the drum kit moving to the other side of the stage, Jimmy (Mr. "play guitar and act like a fucking maniac") stage-kissing an adolescent, and Julia playing bass. But was all (a) appropriate to the crowd (there were a few chants of "anal sex" from shitty dudebros in the back) and (b) much appreciated and reciprocated. It was 10m20s (better than NYC's 7m48s, if Falco can be believed, which he can't) of a sharing that had been going on all along from an up-front crowd of devoted fans and a mid-section of excited dilettantes of shit rock.

There's an element of absurdism to all of their music. Not just absurdism in the Monty Python or randominternet sense, but in the theatrical sense: carefully crafted, inevitable, often disturbingly engrossing absurdism. What first turned me off from The Plot Against Common Sense was how explicit it got against its targets, or how limp certain conclusions are (I cite "Beneath The Waves, An Ocean," to which I'm trying to give the benefit of the doubt, but from which I'm still getting  little but an unexciting invitation to clap your hands); repeated listens are helping to unearth the gems, which are many, and to try to reveal some deeper layers. But I think I'm also butting up against my expectations not just of what, but of how I expect their indirectness to function. Of course if you drop a bandmate and add two more things are going to start working differently. Sometimes I think the band's ceaseless use of ironic distance is the epitome of everything I hate about musical culture, positive cathedrals of irony...and then Lapsed Catholics. Just, simple as shit. Listen to what's there.

It helped to have a small but devoted crowd. The AJJ crowd was everyone but some drunks and me asleep in the corner (having exhausted myself singing along and kicking men out of the pit), and the audience space got pretty unsafe. A good pit is contained, not a swaying wreck of shin-bruising person-trampling madness. And I think the band loved Cleveland's rowdyness, as articulated by the vanguard front row but wholeheartedly enjoyed by the rest of the crowd. It allowed the crowd interaction to be as sleek and quick as their music and the turns it takes.

This was a long set for an opening band, doing a lot of old stuff in a tour for a new record that's getting shit all over the place. Talking to Jack later, apparently it's getting exhuasting to be pulling the new stuff all over the place; I hope that's not a function of audiences not responding to the songs, or getting disappointed. I'll admit, getting to hear the band play two mclusky songs and my favorites from Curses and Travels (except for "Plague of Onces" and "Drink Nike," rest their souls) was a once-in-a-lifetime treat, but a touring band deserves to work, apply, and get reception for material that represents who they are now. Not that they aren't owning everything. I got vague word that they're continuing to write and that something might come out from them next year.

But throughout, every track, every second of that wonderful night: pseudo cockrock; explicit and implicit moments of theater; hooks and patterns accessible to new listeners and hypnotic to old; wild work at high tempos and mesmerizing work at low; carefully uncrafted stage banter; and much much else, but it all seems to center back on rock'n'roll.

9/20: Girlyman @ The Cat in the Cream

There's a genre I've gotten whiffs of over the course of concerting. Queers tend to do it real well, and large groups of people do it well. Large groups of queerios tend to do it best. I'm thinking Dangerous Ponies and The Gertrudes and (my own) Speaker for the Dead. It's a genre based in pop/rock, but focused on mashing a variety of different experiences together on stage; or maybe it's about making standard and beautiful songs about things that don't often get beautiful songs. I think that's what Girlyman mean by gender pop. I heard nothing that astounded me tonight, but I heard a lot of excellent musicianship, different influences, and a rare sense of community around being sexual/gender-expressive others.

The stage lay open with a variety of instruments for the four musicians: acoustic guitars, electric guitar, electric bass, mandolin, banjo, keyboard. This music wasn't sneakily or smoothly diving between their parts like, say, Plume Giant; instead the instrumentation, and the songwriting, was like seeing pleasant different faces of the same dodecahedron or something.

Quite notable also are the consistent 3-part harmonies, usually voicings of a single chord moving to occasional close dissonances. It was this that bound their pop together, which was always reminiscent, though particularly with the keyboard piano patch, of that of Ben Folds. We even got the three of them directing the crowd in 3-part harmonies of their own on "Postcards from Mexico." Even though they lack Ben Folds' overstatement of the same ideas over and over (some songs ended far too quickly to make sense), the need for unified harmony and texture in each of the songs (necessary to make good pop lyrics fly) meant that their fabulous individual musicianship often got lost in the changes, each supporting the other in a whole that was often expectable, not stellar.

But...that's pop. And to that pop they added a variety of personal experience, covers, varied key regions and approaches, music for sexual minorities coming into their own. They're also really, really fucking good at that pop, and really good at each other. They made composing on-the-spot tuning songs, vocal harmonies and all, seem effortless. Maybe it's musical talent and effort that would be better spent in another form, but then, one's studio work can be totally different from one's live work. This music means a lot to a lot of people, and it's well done, facile, often clever in its changes and instrumentation. Stuff like this doesn't always need to break the mold.

So a good time was had by all, with an encore and a standing ovation, a bunch of CDs, and friendly talk with fans and friends after the show. They're on their final tour before a break. I'm excited to spin the CD I got, but more than that I'm excited to follow these musicians into the things that feel right for them.

9/15: Owen Pallett @ Supercrawl

Owen's been doing other things for a while, so this Supercrawl show felt like a return in a whole host of ways. The work that he's done with the band hasn't been presented so visibly and so widely to a North American audience yet; in a way this was make or break. The kernel of new material shone brightly, maybe or maybe not hiding the new directions "the classics" have taken. It's a return for me too; the last time I was in Toronto was an extended mental breakdown culminating in Owen's July show. It was something else back then, but I got a chance to chill out and actually listen this time.

I know how different a touring headspace can be from a composing and recording headspace, and it was a cold and haggard night. Owen performed admirably, but I came for the ideas, not just for the new material, but the songs I've seen live 7 times in the light of tomorrow, wherever that is. I'm trying to make sense of what I'm hearing, and from this concert, there's a lot Owen's been putting on the table for a while, lots of projects on top of his arrangement work, that'll be swept up into whatever happens next.

SETLIST

1. Scandal At The Parkade (solo)
2. In Conflict
3. Midnight Directives
4. Soldier's Rock
5. Tryst With Mephistopheles
6. Infernal Fantasy
7. The Riverbed
8. This Is the Dream of Win and Regine
9. Lewis Takes Off His Shirt
10. The Great Elsewhere

Encore

1. E is for Estranged
2. The Man With No Ankles

 Some thoughts

In Conflict
Swelling, rotating arco+pizz pattern in close intervals with an incredible amount of momentu. Diving through dirty synth swells, sparse at other times. There's a funk-styled freedom to the bassline, but also one shifting under the weight of a high pedal tone. There's definitely polytonality (a la Ives, for example, mixing the same or recognizable figures in different keys, lending itself to a disorienting but not overly unpleasant sense of collage) and quarter tones in there somewhere.

Having seen Owen play with Les Mouches before, nothing here felt very new to me; for my thoughts from last year's Toronto performance, go here. However, I did not before appreciate the freedom the band grants Owen. Just in the form and in the technology, looping requires a basis of some figure which informs, if not determines, the tonality of every other passage you play. When Owen goes on the fan forums talking about repetitive music, I think that implies using smaller, and therefore more flexible, nuggets of material. Less melody and more pedal point or cantus firmus. The band is there to turn it into a song, of which the looping is an integral but on-its-own-powerless part.

Midnight Directives
I remember that MD used to be the last track of Heartland under a different name and title; there's still something very different about it from the rest of the album to me, something I think Owen's exploiting. The piece is a collection of moments, in relation to the 5th/tritone drone and the quick/unreachable pizz, but still fractured. On the recording the strings swoop in arco, pop out, come back pizz, leave room for a bassoon scale, none of it in a unit until the final moments. It fits together as a disoriented expansive mess.

Building off of IC, the band gives Owen a powerful but flexible means with which to create distinct moments from the loops. With less orchestral material to fill in, the song strips down into a collage of these moments, taut and flinging near each other. The buildup to "bit of meat" should be a climax, but it's a false peak, a structural deceptive cadence, probably leading to the most cacophany of most of his songs; the band does a lot of extra repetition of the next climax in order to bind it back together aesthetically enough to finish. The music becomes about the exchange between subdivisions, of the smallest moments refusing to be tied structurally to a monolithic whole. This is small music.

Soldier's Rock
The lyrics changed! And everything changed a little bit. Matt was onstage with a Mopho synthesizer, which increased the depth of the synth play around the song. Still linear, still funky, but the outro took that regularity and smashed it up against the wall. Owen was ripping at the violin (did a bowstring come off at this song, or earlier?), tearing away at antitonal passages. More than anything, the song gives an insight into the violence of Owen's lyrics and writing. There are bits and pieces being posted on the fanforums' sticky, and they're juicy juicy bits.

Tryst w/ Mephistopheles
So, what are the artistic implications of krautrock? What are the challenges and the flexibilities of the genre, what does the m.o. do to the material which lives within it? There's something common to both Jazz and to classical music that minimalism in its broadest sense, some kind of stripping down or stripping away, had to happen before new complexity could be built. I'm thinking of Sun Ra's unrestraint and the Marsalis family, or the vogue of minimalism which is now diffused into pop film scores and the cogs of overwrought compositional cathedrals alike. I think Krautrock takes that crisis, leans toward minimalism a bit, but adds the drums to make it fun.

Tryst begins with a fifth and a drumbeat and a bassline on the root. Everything else has a time and a place to remove itself from that order. The band accented the sense of entrapment this approach to material can generate. We'd like there to be a lyrical breakout of song, but the melody will keep on descending until it reaches hell, or repeat itself dancing in circles to its eventual death (and lack of interest), but everything is too carefully controlled. The most powerful moments for me, when the violin recasts that open fifth into major and minor modes at a stroke, and when the breakdown bass pattern returns to close the song, are moments which just barely seem to break out, but get caught back into the fold.

Infernal Fantasy
There's a romantic energy to the piece, the arpeggios feel inspired from the accompaniments to lieder. There are moments of breakout rock to punctuate, but this is a very short song which makes its tense and charged point as quickly as possible. It's maybe the most cousin (if not by blood) to Midnight Directives on the stock of new songs. The dissonances mixed between those streams of notes sound even more disturbing

Riverbed
I really don't know what to say. This song came out of nowhere, it wasn't even "Dark Behind The Sky" which was performed in Japan. It begins with a drum machine, setting expectation and crescendoing but dropping out before the violin enters. The violin pattern...okay. Take "Wake Up," and marry it shotgun. Fill it with booze and pills and the violent monotony of your daily life, corrupt it slowly with promises of love. Ruin it and everything it stands for, slash its voice, and leave it stuck and cold on the street when you're done. Supply bass and drums and let it sing. That's what you're working with here.

Win/Regine
The clearest thing about this crowd-pleaser for me is that, if the band wanted it to be so, it could sound exactly like the recording on Has a Good Home, all the hand claps and swells. But it don't, and it won't. Rob's to thank I think (his astonishing percussion work is everything I want to be in a backing performer). He pays attention instead to rhythmic density and intensity and interchange, not the clearer romantic sweep of timbre and pitch that accompany some bands' crescendos.

Scandal / ... / LTOHS + Elsewhere + Estranged + Ankles
I stopped taking notes and wrote "TOO BUSY MOSHING" once "Shirt" started. What that meant was "too busy moshing with myself," which meant more of "too busy navalgazing and mouthing lyrics to function." I had a lot of fun and couldn't really pick out much to say. In retrospect, Owen knew where to put the new stuff for maximum effectiveness, and despite all the innovations in dissonance and everything else, Owen kept these ones pretty straight. It was heartening. No matter what work he does, he wants to perform and have his work performable, and is willing to end sets like this. And even then, Ankles didn't exist two years ago, and now it's the crowd-pleasing finale.

---

So: polytonality, pedal points / cantus firmi vs. ostinati, collage, subdivision, violence, entrapment, rhythm, dissonance. Another thing, from listening to the recordings above (thanks to vestenet), it's all really fucking fast. The best thing to get your ear ready might be Ruth Crawford Seeger's String Quartet 1931. Crawford Seeger worked a lot around dissonance, working in a style called "dissonant counterpoint" and proposing systems where everything tonal was replaced with something antitonal, i.e. dissonances are good and consonances are meant to pass between dissonances but not take focus. The logic of her 3rd and 4th movements (linked) are strict in their logic much in the way that looping forces a strict logic; they are also wildly inventive and disturbing, powerful in their closeness to something that sounds just barely natural. If you don't like it, play along with a maraca and see how you feel (dat tactile pulse).

It was only after I got back from the show that I saw Owen had posted a few of his own comments about the music and setlist for that night. Choice: "very loud and distorted but in a soothing beautiful way," "Old songs sound exploded like "you set Heartland on fire and a phoenix emerges" - Kevin. New songs sound "better than your old songs, like, kill them dead." - Ben." The new tunes are part of a handful that'll supposedly be on the record out next year. There's a lot to prepare, for all of us, I think. If we're into what's happening, then we shouldn't neglect thinking about what's gotten Owen there, the events and travels and other kinds of festivals and performance engagements. He's been gathering widely from the opportunities presented, and I think we'll be all the richer for it.

Plume Giant

I had no idea who these people were before I walked in the door of the show our band was opening. Such a fucking gift.  Plume Giant.

They are a trio in the truest sense of the word. Every song is testing the range of skills each of them have, and what they can switch between. The interest of the music comes not just from their individual talents, but in the sense of flexibility and range of expression that each of them have. Maybe that feeling comes from their control and technique, but there's also something in light and crisp folk music that lends itself well to the ear: there are so few performers, so many instrumental breaks, and such different instrumentation that nothing could be muddy. Their level of technique is such that it needn't even be commented on; it was such that the quickness of their minds, of their powerful arrangements and inventions, and of the often rambling non-repetitive structure of their music, that shone through their technique like a prism. It was like watching 3 similarly-trilingual people speaking three different languages and understanding each other perfectly. The vocalist/violinist/organist/tambouriner, the guitarist/main-vocalist, and the violist/guitarist/vocalist.

There's a lovely kind of quick-wittedness to their music. They rely on the virtuosity of their performance, the switching between instruments, and their beautifully executed 3-part harmonies to draw the listener in. It's brilliant; it's also showy magic that allows a more relaxed approach to structuring songs. Sometimes that worked brilliantly, but other times the pieces sagged under their own weight. A classically-trained jazz-aware approach to simple folk progressions and storytelling can mean pretty gestures, or it can mean deeply meaningful links of pretty gestures, and I got both. It made me realize how much my music and the bands I play in rely on ostinati and a certain set "sound" for a piece in order to function. There's a bravery in evolution, something I hear in some of Joanna Newsom's best scores as well. Pop is more about the unification of texture, maybe, whereas folk is more about using often-limited resources (voice+guitar, small acoustic ensemble) to create however much variation on a message that's necessary/worthwhile. And this was all invention on strong cores and it was all, all, all great.

8/22: Locria + Little War Twins + SFTD // Styk + ACLU Benefit + Perfumeman + Math the Band

Worcestor is the second largest city in New England. Its sister cities are Worcestor, England; Piraeus, Greece; Pushkin, Russia; Afula, Israel; and, depending on who you talk to, Detroit, MI. I've gotten to pop through the city on a bike passing by and a bandmate working. More thoughts on Speaker for the Dead later, but mainly I've been introduced to a complicated music scene with a young generation on the rise. I felt at times, half naked, sweaty, painted and hoarse, like I was one of the cool kids I always wanted to be at shows, but the devotion to the local scene is worth much more than anybody's delusions. These were two shows, overlapping somewhat, at 97D on Webster and and the Firehouse.

Locria
I'd heard of them through Zack Shaw, a wonderful songwriter, guitarist and tourmate, this being work very different from the pop-punk overtones of The Hotel Year. Mainly I was enthralled by the interplay between the guitars, and how smooth and neither-boring-nor-predictable the breakdowns were. The jamming/proggy bits didn't hit me as much as the tighter songs, but then again, the bassist didn't know the last song very well and did a fantastic job working it all out.

Little War Twins
Hadn't heard of them, though I missed their sharing the stage with The Furies and Bright, the Morning, two wonderful area bands. A 5(ish) piece act fronted by an acoustic guitarist, flanked by a violinist and an electric guitarist often with slide in hand. The result was a set of flexible textures, most remarkable for its ability to swandive gracefully into hard fucking breakdowns and pop back out again. Although I'm not sure how their synergy was as a band, they were certainly tight, and each had powerful and well-understood roles within the band, with a kind of love-infused proclamation riding the lyrics. Kind of like their friends and tourmates Fifth Nation, their spiritual bent isn't my thing, but it clearly provides a center for a rock-solid band.

SFTD - we. kicked. ass.

//

STYK + ACLU Benefit
Missed the set to arrive there and get into the nitty-gritty about personal safety and community responsibility within these music venues, and within the scene as a whole. Apologies! As for ACLU Benefit, the Stephen Merritt comparisons are justified.

Perfumeman
Got really pumped for these two from their rig: drum sequencer, floor tom, mics, cello with looping pedal setup. It was a beautifully flexible set, jumping between beat driven fatalist pop and queer ditties without disturbing. The fog and lasers were not too distracting, there were some but not-enough embracings of musical anarchy, too much flirting, I was more focused on the looping rig. A touring band doing the good work from Denver, moving some butts with a tight aesthetic, good luck to them.

Math the Band
A famous band never heard of, chiptune dance pop gods in their own right, two hard rocking musicians with a good sense of theatrics and a great sense of beat. They were apparently worried about SFTD stealing their Thunder, on a Wednesday night after a recent Andrew W.K. tour in a cooler venue. Despite all the intersections of hype and expectation, they wiped everything clean with their dextrous but often-still-free-to-mess-with-people hands. Perhaps not a permanent butt-moving experience of a night, but only as many butts as you feel need to rocked at the moment.

Centipede Hz: Stream of Consciousness

Moonjock: pulse like you mean it, pulse like we don’t know what meter is, lay the vocals across it like it’s the easiest thing. we know when the radio set’s ended. it’s disappointing to lose the bass and drop into 4/4, building the energy back together to jump around like you’re someone flipping the volume on the radio in rhythm. I don’t feel what you’re developing but when the bass dives back I wonder if maybe the crescendos will blow out my ears with headphones. at the very least you’ve made a music of density and lack thereof. the album rises from the synthy muck just as much as from the list of influences.

Today's Supernatural: chick choom. the kind of energy it takes to drop the beat away on your “lelelelelelet”s is the same it takes to drive the arpeggios together. MPP never really gave up on its sense on silence. It’s not that you haven’t been this tight before, but you’re not just pushing the tempos up, you’re dancing more clearly in front of the eye. I feel like you trust me more, undistorted and playing on regular beats with handclaps. It’s not about pop, trying to genrify into that is either a tautology or useless. you’re straying too far from your hook and that’s part of your game, to spread us out and make us feel lost even while we know that the rhythm is something almost too familiar to the radio. nice accelerating part; rhythm is still in your control, your god to toy me with.

Rosie Oh: and you start a third groove and it’s corrupted from the start, and the halo of noise becomes more interesting and worthwhile as the passenger’s more worth it than the car. you’re opposing what your bass is plucking out and its rocky progressions and drifting into them when you feel, riding the synths back in and out. this is music of attention, attention is the manipulated factor, the pitch and timbre are a harmonic language that-

Applesauce: oh this one’s pretty. nice use of “lil honey” to draw intensity from what was just a little push. in some ways this sounds like their first record with the tempos up and synths up, is that the same bass tone? this song I could get into forever, progressing from part to part holding my hand a lot more than the earlier ones. I’m not quite bored yet, I wonder if the word for what you’re doing in spinning out these parts is in “progressive” or in “epic” (as in, the theater, and Of Montreal’s fortspinnung) or in “collage” since the parts don’t quite fit together in a really refreshing way, like there’s a bit of modulation to get from one instrumentation and chord progression to another, a certain amount of potential energy to overcome. a lot of these songs repeat themselves a lot! goodness guys I can’t hear the differences between the repeats on these speakers. the song winds down  to counting and four-on-the-floor with the 12/8 you hint at flitting about like a ghost.

Wide Eyed: wispy whispery. a contained rocket-arpeggio, an engine. you use tricks like this to hide the quicker pulses, like there’s some 14-year old drum student tapping out double-tap rolls behind each song that you phase in and out or something. not literally. nice use of the bass  to alter and compress the groove. these songs could go so many more places, at the same time! they could lose some of their structural redundancy and each generate enough material (pleasant motivic redundancy, Mozart!) to kick around for 8-9 minutes. who’s singing? this song paces about in its pen for a bit and then never really gets out, brings you down into it kinda.

Father Time: starting without mama bass! you oh my good just insert yourself where needed. you’re clearly working with the same materials in all of these songs, using idioms that blink briefly into the most intense beat you’ve ever heard and dropping itself back into a stable home for what a “song” should be. 

New Town Burnout: up and down, up an down, up a down. the rhythm’s only the most stressed and tentative of glues, the road and the empty space, slowly populated by motion and by sync with the rising density of the vocals.  this is fun, this is fun, this is easy too. when you drop it all out like that, though, it’s not as exciting, it’s built into us and we never really lose it, it doesn’t have the same tension as your “leleles.”

Monkey Riches: Please get into some glitch here PLEASE it would make my day, I want it to come! I don’t want every facet of how you can mix things together and turn your face away from the massive cathedral-in-process-of-collapsing house of rhythm that this could be. once you get used to this, there’s no drama I can hear…am I asking the wrong things? you get to a great place at the end of that one!

Mercury Man: oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh that that that that that that “sounds like she’s talking to me on the phone” I’m in love with the groundwork for this one, if this is what your formulas can do then I do not mind, I can not mind the crown this jewel is in. kick stop! kick stop! woooooeoeoeo.

Pulleys: I don’t have much else on the rest of these. They invent themselves in clever ways that I can’t quite pinpoint right now, it sounds like the subtlties are worth diving into, I can’t quite hear what the currents of synths are doing to carry the sounds along. This feels like something very new in pop, something not in the 2k0s, hinted at in Radiohead and Sufjan’s last releases, something using a quieter language to make louder things, a decade of whirring and silence and loops.

Amanita: there was another song! it was fine.

Unitarians take the summer off for church. Then members of the community get together in a lay-led service to tackle the question of, say, why we don't go to normal church in the summer. I do think it's a wonderful thing, though. The crowd tends to be older folk, in crowds from 3 to 20 median 10, people who have known each other for many years. The ministry is very intimate, and very dear, and I think people also get a thrill from getting to forge together readings and musings and...music. That's where I come in. Every Saturday night I sit down at a keyboard in the kitchen (with parents long asleep), and bang out the two hymns I've been asked to perform the night of. It's slightly irresponsible, yes; but I CAN do it if I'm in the right place. More to the point, sometimes I only get those hymns Friday or Saturday. And I inevitably work both days.

Sometimes I'll begin the work by doing a harmonic analysis of the thing. That's fun to do on the train, and gives me the opportunity to flub the inner two voices while hanging on to the bass and melody. Unitarians are notoriously bad singers, so not only do the same hymns we know get repeated time and time again, but as long as you have the melody and basic predominant-dominant-tonic structure, you'll be fine.

For practicing: I go by systems, maybe half systems. Start with hands alone briefly (maybe 5 minutes total) and move on to half or quarter systems or pushing them together. It's a kind of memorization for me, a convincing of each finger that the next motion on the page is the only possible following motion. Playing the right sequence, then, just feels like home, stability, and complicity. And move along, practicing my half or quarter systems plus a chord or two of the next, so when I later graft them all together it feels more natural. A common pitfall is to make the chunk too long, or keep playing a part I know well; good practicing means constantly challenging my comfort with the piece. I can't even think of halting until l I can play it through a few times in a row perfectly. And then I let it sit in my head for a bit while I begin the other hymn.

Returning to the first (and later the second) him, I do run throughs and take care of problem spots, often in quarter-system chunks. I try also to play it through as if performing (i.e. through each of the voices); it's then a matter of hanging onto your continuity, keeping your mind from wandering, and relaxing into the soft crevasses of a piece. 

By this point I conk out and wake up, and do a remedial practice. At a certain point there's only so much work I can do. I play without looking at my hands, and the key size and action on the sanctuary's grand is much different than my upright's. I try to arrive around 9:30, make pleasantries, and bang things out.

In addition to the two hymns I'm asked to play a prelude, offeratory, and postlude. These are very short, and end up being snippets of pop songs, or most often sections of things I've already written. I sometimes debut things there, taking the postlude to perform something for longer. If I'm working on a classical piece I'll play a section, but that's always less fun than getting comments on that "interesting thing you just played." And the hymns? They'll fly or they won't, and if the sextant's there he'll probably get very critical, and he can go away.

Pit falls: twice I have had even a small amount of alcohol before attempting this. Both times have been terrrrrrible.

The Suburbs: Reviewsing Pt. 1: Structure Porn

This post is a continuation of this intro, mostly the theory behind the album's structure, and some of how it lends to the listening experience. Structural tricks like these give me, at least, some sense of arrival, both from song to song, with doubling/grouping, and overall, in the splitting. They also allow an artist a more complete control ("ok, this pair will be 9:27, this will be 9:55, but this will be 6:02! ha!") over the frame of their work. If you're going to handle a concept as general (and as blasé?) as suburban life. The record can take its time and be deep without boring, by placing an idea between two songs (beginning, modern, emptiness/without...).

This split in half thing, it's definitely a convenience, but as I'll note it adds a theatricality to the work; more consequentially, it frames the transition from a more optimistic first half to more pessimistic second half (or at least, more peppy to more somber). Pairing gives us two sides of one idea and illustrates all the muddy paradoxes living within these suburban paradoxes. Elsewhere, gapping accentuates how each song tries to get off the ground so earnestly, and seems to fade and need a restart (fadeout then tutti). "I can finally begin" at track 12? Despite all yearnings to hold on to something, we drive past it instead, and the spectacles get further apart. The shortest distance of all is between arguably the most contrasting tracks, Sprawls I and II, as if a last hurrah to save something totally broken.

Splitting. Take the album in two halves of 8 tracks: each takes a bit over a half hour (33:04 and 31:10); each begins with a "Suburb" song with the "in the suburbs I..." vocal lick; each is flanked by a Pt1/2 set of songs. In good Act 1 / Act 2 fashion, the first is longer, and the second has a coda/restatement to the ideas presented throughout. Separating the acts is an 18 second fadeout, the longest by far after Modern Man's 12 second fadeout and Half Light's 13 second fadeup. I do also think that the first half is more musically boisterous, while the second is more clearly depressed (as fuuuuck).

Doubling. For the most part, the songs fit very well into pairs or groups (themes mine):

• 1 and 2 (begin): by a 9 sec violin tone, and also by "first"/expository style. 9:27.
• 3 and 4 (modern): by the word "modern", starkly. 9:55.
• 5 and 6 (without): by a 9 sec string tone. 6:02.
• 7 and 8 (half-light): by name and 9 sec synth tone. 8:40
• 9: an interlude and underture, marking the transition between halves. 4:45.
• 10 and 11 (destiny): by 11 sec synth tone, and by "first they built the roads...". 7:10.
• 12 + 13 + 14 + 15 (shadow): linked all by themes of light and dark. 17:48. Also:
• 12 + 13: theme of technology and communication (weak, I think)
• 13 + 14: listen for the 12 sec rumbling sound effect between these two
• 14 + 15: title.
• 16: postlude and coda. 1:27.

Gapping. Unlike Neon Bible building to No Cars Go's climax, the Suburbs deliberately reduces the energy of its songs by increasing the length/use of fadeouts and gaps as time passes (measures based on track divisions; fadeouts are grooves while dying away is a riff or note):

• 1 to 2: transition; 9 sec
• 2 to 3: silence, then fadeup; ~5 sec
• 3 to 4: 12 sec fadeout, then tutti; 12 sec
• 4 to 5: tutti; ~0 sec
• 5 to 6: transition; 9 sec
• 6 to 7: dies away, then fades up; 20 sec
• 7 to 8: transition; 9 sec
• 8 to 9: fadeout, then tutti; 18 sec
• 9 to 10: dies away, then tutti; 15 sec
• 10 to 11: transition (within a fadeout); 11 sec (24 sec)
• 11 to 12: fadeout, then tutti; 15 sec
• 12 to 13: dies away, then tutti; 32 sec
• 13 to 14: faint transition (within a dying away); 12 sec (32 sec)
• 14 to 15: silence, then tutti; 3 sec.
• 15 to 16: fadeout into silence, then tutti; 35 sec
• 16 out: fadeout; 20 seconds

Heartland: How to Move

I wrote this essay almost a year ago. I'm proud of parts of it, but virginal stuff like "fully intentioned concept record" grosses me out, as does the writing. But I like the model I developed, it felt good in writing, and it had a lot of good citations. I stand by it. It's audience is an unfamiliar listener.


The violinist Owen Pallett released his third LP [1], Heartland, on January 12^th 2010. Following the rushed yet elegiac Has a Good Home (2005), and the string-quartet song cycle He Poos Clouds (2006), Heartland is a firmly intentioned concept album, following the journey of the farmer Lewis through the world of Spectrum. However, this concept is not removed from incisive implications on life. Pallett’s second release used the format of a string quartet song cycle and the rough concept of the eight schools of magic of Dungeons and Dragons to explore how atheists approach death [2], and Heartland works similarly. His latest work folds in love (from the perspective of the loved), violence, masculinity, and the limits of creative expression, all within the journey of his protagonist.

Some background on Pallett and his work provides useful background for understanding Heartland, both because the album contains a character name Owen, and since his music is self-referential: “Even though while I was writing about [the character of] Lewis...when I’m writing about him, I’m still writing about me...I felt a little laid bare” [3]. One of the major threads through his career has been his love of geek culture [4]. Has a Good Home both idealizes and bemoans fantasy novels and games as escapes from reality, and He Poos Clouds uses Dungeons and Dragons as a proxy for religion. Although Heartland's concept is less apparently nerdy, it is important to recognize that Pallett is again playing with the boundary of fantasy themes; in the case of Heartland, the character Lewis will rebel against the limits of his reality. In the spirit of playful geekiness, Pallett will spice the lyrical and musical structures he creates with puns and references [5]. Pallett is also gay, which adds a subtext to the nearly homoerotic love between Lewis and the deity Owen, between creator and fantasy, and the place of the singer in this fourth-wall-shattering mess. In the end, Heartland is a progression of a man who follows his desires, but whether that man is the subject matter Lewis, the god Owen, the singer Pallett, or some combination of all three has to be decided.

[1] A list of relevant discography is available in the Addendum.
[2] http://www.youaintnopicasso.com/2006/04/18/qa-with-owen-pallett-of-final-fantasy/
[3] http://www.thelinknewspaper.ca/blogs/link_newspaper/2297
[4] Until very recently, Pallett recorded and performed under the name Final Fantasy, a reference to the video games series of the same name.
[5] As a perfect example: “Heartland” was a 1986 video game for the ZX Spectrum 48K. Owen would have been seven years old at release time. Tip from therethere on Dec 29 2009 from fanforums, also http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=000226

Midnight Directives [7]: the march

The first piece on this album begins in ambiguity: a loud electronic organ shifts back between a solid perfect fifth, the cornerstone of tonal music, and the tritone, the devil's interval. Not only will the piece build across this highly unstable foundation, but it will do so using suspended notes and a heavy amount of accidents and chromatic movement. The effect is tamer at first; the voices shift between comfortable thirds and slightly dissonant seconds, and the strings glissando a diminished ninth up from B and E, the most dissonant of notes within this F Lydian (raised fourth) key to C and F.

Despite this entrancing yet uncomfortable dissonance, the voice rings out like a horn, declaiming bravely, almost foolishly. The voice sings of distance from some feminine figure, or femininity in general, in favor of the freedom of red blood and burned connections to the past; the percussion gives tempo and insistence to this ambition. On the other hand, his path is set for him, by the power and violence of nature itself; the chirping wind trills and chromatic descents mirror that “tornado,” or the frenzied wings of a bird. Somehow the vocal line ends up in Bb major at the same time, furthering the ambiguity behind this ambition. It is the strings, moving across notes and creating the greatest dissonances, which mark the beginning of a new section; strings will soon exemplify the exact kind of atonal ambiguity that is presented here, in the first song.

Once the chorus begins, the vocal approach changes significantly. His seductive descriptions of his future, of cutlasses, of a clear purpose in “service,” and lack of responsibility (or femininity, in his family) do not match the tentative stepwise rising and falling of the line. A snare/bass drum rhythm is added which accelerates the song, yet it seems to fill the chorus measures randomly, the snare roll ending after an awkward twenty-one hits. The bass moves as well, changing the chord structure to include accidentals from Bb major...regardless of the insistent organ. The singer is unsure, and is dismayed at his circumstances, and yet insistent on continuing.

Yet adding to the glitz of the song comes a rhythmic pizzicato violin figure, and on cue Lewis begins a discussion of the deity Owen, and his own youth. The two are related by Lewis' sense of belonging, and returning to a “Saturday night” world with adventure, and some sort of “Midnight Directives” to complete. Owen seems to grant that, yet at the same time seduces Lewis into rejecting marital bonds, into a “trick with a prick of a pin,” as a sex figure, quite possibly. The creation is playing into the whim of the creator, a moral subtext that Lewis seems determined to ignore at the moment in his ever-the-more confident delivery; in fact, after the second chorus, the singer buoys his rising melody on the swelling violas and violins (Owens’s trademark), and reaches a falsetto climax about the worthlessness of all souls, as just food for men and food for fire. The repetition of this line ad infinitum is important; the violent spirit and repetition of this piece has seduced Lewis into a military march, right into the hands of Owen.

[7] "I fully expected to recycle and change the order of the songs... the flow of the album is far more important to me than the cohesion of the narrative.” (Owen from Final Fantasy on Jan 3rd 2010 on Fanforums) Although the order was altered from its "original" state, some sequences have been left in order. See the Addendum for commentary on tracklist continuity and the lyrics of the B-Sides and Spectrum, 14th Century.

Keep the Dog Quiet / Mt. Alpentine: walking in circles

Whereas Lewis was seduced by the preceding track's mad ambition, this understated piece focuses heavily on its own repetition: a figure of piano and low strings modulating between the relative minor and major, laced with dissonance to add emphasis to the already booming parallel fifths. Much like the preceding piece, wind lines accent and force notes onto the beat, horn lines mirror Lewis' ambition, and string lines, or in this case ghostly improvising between two notes, represent ambiguity and Owen's hand. Lewis spends the song in his own head, sifting through dreams and memories of what he left. The voice's mourning tone contains many more descending than ascending figures, and works across many dissonances of its own; there is some regret or nervousness in both of these qualities. Moreover, its rhythm either moves across the holes in the main riff or follows it blindly, marking a sort of indecision about where to commit himself. The second verse (“When will you...”) widens in orchestration as Lewis' imagination spreads to question the entirety of Spectrum. The repeat of “sequential, sequential...” builds to a terrifying major-key climax twice, and the second time breaks free into action.

Lewis broke free from questioning the story he's placed in for the first time. He doubts the trust of Owen and notices all the violence and terror he causes, his violin playing on despite his absolute control of Spectrum. Lewis realizes the extent of Owen's control, and sees Owen's lie in promising so much satisfaction (instead, “this union is a cage about a cage about a cage”). Whatever the story around him is, he claims, “this place is a narrative mess.” To escape this, Lewis skates into the Mt. Alpentine sequence, with score written in B and vocals in Bb. Furiously dissonant like the wind itself, Lewis gives himself up to his sense of “satisfaction.” To drive the implications of his spiritual brooding, Lewis goes from walking in circles to jumping forward into the breach [8], embracing the tonal ambiguity which Owen so represents, even in Lewis' attempts to escape.

[8] In the original lyrical order, this sequence was followed by Tryst With Mephistopheles, although not too much lyrical continuity is lost if Lewis decides to, instead, Take Action.

Red Sun No. 5: heartbeat

Lewis has espoused night as the cover for his actions, and the arrival of sunlight reveals the exact nature of what he fears most: the transiency of his own life. The pulse of the song is begun by two electronic instruments of opposite types: the ARP 2600, contributing a buzzing octave and bass-drum note, and the Wurlitzer, contributing sweet broken chords. This pulse is Lewis' pulse: caught between the wail of war and the caress of peace, Lewis can shout thunder from his chest to reject his station in life, and comfort his wife with a touch to her heart. Once Lewis has recognized his spiritual problem in the fragility of his body, he tries to both escape and maintain this pulse.

The musicality lends immediately to Lewis' humanity. While the winds distract and pivot away from any central order or tonality, percussion and timpani lines put emphasis on those regular downbeats. The voice, between these extremes, cascades down, signifying resignation. The voice's high point is when the pulse cuts out, and he is lost only in the lilting and moaning of the strings and winds, away from that pulse and its requirements. The "cover of night" is enough for Lewis for now, as Owen wants. But the created has now questioned both his world and himself; where could his doubt go next?

Lewis Takes Action: strutting

After more serious, weighty, and atonal pieces, the bouncy drum line that begins this piece is out of place, something not suspect or double-meaning. It emerges from the mush of foreboding wailing horns. The piece is further augmented with some strange his on snare and violins (direction: "turn to random pitches, descend and die away"), creating more tonal chaos, while the sweetest melodies of the wind section, like a triumphant birdsong, eventually is corrupted. One can trace this piece as a palatable pop song imploding, showing all the cracks and misses in Lewis' supposed "satisfaction." Even the baseline, which does not start on the tonic, and which frustrates the typical C to Db movement common in tonal music, ruins the bouncy goal of this piece.

Lewis has a reason to be proud in this piece. His success against the Cockatrice No-Face proves him a hero of Spectrum. But in his faith to the "bidding of the singer," Lewis engages in frighteningly violent behavior: bludgeoning to death, breaking a bird by its beak, having some sort of "amber whip, and the fire from my fingers." This man is the red-winged bird come to life, but for his own satisfaction. The final moments of the piece have a near-comical voice gliss leading to strong dissonance in the wind trills, adding tension and confusion. Lewis and Owen are satisfied, but in the following series of chained songs, this too shall pass.

The Great Elsewhere: sailing crashing

Cutting in quickly with two startling chords, this piece replaces the artifice of its predecessor with more visible cracks in the pop structure: backwards piano, glitch-like insertions (which fit rhythmically into the faster portion of the song), and a stuttering synth line. Something has changed significantly in this piece: vocals are almost entirely descending lines, and atonality is limited to ornamental 7ths and 9ths; there is an actual chord progression without atonal mishmash frustrating it (e - FM7 - Gdom7 - Gsus4); and a jarring tempo switch. In only the first bars of this tune, so much has changed. Owen's smug atonality is gone, and in its place are softer, more painful, more sincere chords.

The melancholic 3/2 groove morphs, after some laments by Lewis about his inability to prove Owen's love, into a much more aggressive percussion. Horn blasts and percussion and flashes of light from the violins put us firmly in 4/4, but it feels so jarring, recontexualizing everything we assumed about the song in the first place. It's a betrayal of expectation, just as Owen betrays Lewis' in the song's story. Sailing out to see to colonize, Lewis realizes more and more about Owen's lust for him: "and every time I show it I feel your eyes on me." As the swoops and flashes of the orchestra increase, eventually gaining the momentum to play eighth notes alongside the drums, Owen's love seems absent, and while Lewis is still engaging in his violent missionary campaigns, he finds the meaning absent when he tries to convert one native: he is attacked, lanced through the shoulder. Owen's indifference finally appears to him in the full orchestra climax of every instrument, and with that we return to 3/2, left to mourn with only a few violins. The song fades out into chord movement across a minor seventh arpeggio, losing all of its momentum to solemnity and indecisive tonality.

Oh Heartland, Up Yours!: plodding

If Lewis Takes Action set up the expectations to destroy, and The Great Elsewhere destroyed them, this piece plots how Lewis, the ultraviolent former farmer abandoned by god, reacts. Sure of Owen's betrayal yet unsure of how to go on, the song begins with the third beat removed from every measure, like a halted pace. The bass drags itself from it's i chord to its iv, and the horns, reminiscent of Midnight Directives’ starting thirds in the voice, follow sullenly. Everything's done: "seems there is nothing more."

The piece's simple tonality is striking after the complexity of The Great Elsewhere. The orchestration remains lush, yet restraint is showed in the verses. The vocals dither about upper or lower movement, but in the chorus firmly descend while Lewis laments the power of his god. The brushes make those shuffling footsteps visceral, and their place in the second verse gives the piece a bit more focus. Other melodies begin intersecting with Lewis' as he critiques how Owen tried to pigeonhole him into some gay stereotype, and rebels: "doesn't work, doesn't fly, doesn't handle." "Satisfaction," instead, becomes the focus, and under its rule the song becomes a full-on quarter note groove, with a syncopated baseline, military percussion, and the steady gait of someone in control. Lewis finishes with an upward melody line, a decision to strive against Owen's designs. Atonality enters here and only here, to accompany this disturbing ambition of Lewis: to reject his Homeland, and to embark on a journey to kill Owen.

Lewis Takes Off His Shirt: galloping

Ending the cycle started by Lewis Takes Action for a two-song interlude by a piece of Paper and Owen, Lewis here shows the full extents of his violent and energetic capability. Yet, fed up with all of the themes and implications and betrayals he has reduced himself to a mathematical movement, a being driven by only satisfaction and his energy. During his ride he questions motives and life and expression, but comes back to his refrain: "I'm never gonna give it to you." Shirtless and sexualized, this is Lewis at his simplest, as exemplified by the simple, striving chords and clarity of the arrangement (besides those pesky violin swells, representing the pursuit of his fate).

The song begins with a different kind of hum: not a violin or horn, but an electronic swell, crescendoing, wailing and breaking into electronic double-time synth playing. With only the tempo and the hihat to sustain it, these chords must be the driving force. The violin swell does come like an angel of fate, but Lewis strives onward. Much of the piece has melodies that end on the on-beat, and the rest are descending; the melodies either mark Lewis' sense of loss or drive him faster and faster, like an internal dialog. The snare click pushes it even further. Winds play their stereotypical chirping trill which, although random, later becomes as frequent as the snare drum itself. Enough has been built to break through the second violin swell, and Lewis continues with a societal critique of a false governing power. On and on and on, clarinets begin to double the melody and violins sneak their way into the arrangement. In the final verse the horn joins in to declare its bombast, as "the vector" continues on his ever-blinded way. The last chorus adds in all the 9ths and 7ths and sixteenth notes that it can handle, even with violins providing more punch. Lewis has achieved his most pure ignorance and devotion to his task; and the stage must be set for the confrontation on Alpentine.

Flare Gun and E is for Estranged: interlude montage

Shifting gears to a piece of Spectrum propaganda, biting and bitter atonality returns to this major-key piece flirting with minor-key definitions and notes. The random percussion would imply some sort of carnival around it, and yet this song is a call to war. The nearly-drunken tempo changes and bleating horns add an element of self-absorbed frenzy. The pamphlet gives us promises of exactly what Lewis left, exactly what never satisfied, returning the atonality of Owen's rule back into focus, closing in on Lewis and his purpose. With a cued-by-conductor series of amazingly dissonant hits, the deal is sealed: Spectrum is insane.

After so much angry and energetic climax, Estranged gains great weight and should evoke surprise in a listener, especially considering that Owen is likely the speaker. The score contains little for winds and horns, but violins create nearly all of the tone and energy. This piece is Owen's elegy for the ways of the world, the themes which Lewis is rushing blindly towards looked at from a wider perspective of men everywhere, committing acts of violence against each other, running like water. Its first act is to bend the resolution of Flare Gun into a long hum of quarter steps, every string on every instrument screaming its lament. A sad waltz figure for the piano cuts through, setting up a very long progression to follow, and very slowly enticing the strings to double it. Even when the strings tremolo on two wildly dissonant notes, the motion is kept, which foreshadows the insatiable groove of Tryst With Mephistopheles to follow. The lyric descends with more regret than Lewis ever could muster, beyond his obsession with his desires. After the first chorus, a melody emerges, a sort of example to follow, and on cue a morbid 25-year old son becomes the focus of the piece. Owen feels frustrated at the boy's inability to express himself, much like his father: the "liar," the "flightless bird.” That melody gets so many additions and plays off it that the piano riff changes during the next chorus, without disrupting the flow at all. Another melody, after the percussive breakdown, intersects with the first, and the cage of sounds is complete. Even though the "pathos" of Lewis and of everyone else is useless, Owen will play, Owen will sing; the people, unbeknownst to them, need Owen. The final question of the album, the line between creator and creation, is set.

Tryst With Mephistopheles: sprinting

The final conflict begins between the wailing of strings and the pulses of a bass and drum rock beat. The strings play randomly with a motif, tossing it around and modulating it, while the beat continues on blindly, with the occasional shift. Owen’s power and Lewis’ determination are mixing, building off each other: for example, the strings and piano take an atonal melody which seems to pivot around the central beat, even mixing with the vocal line later. The first sounds of the voice, not surprisingly a descending line, are accompanied with muted horns: the bombast of Lewis’ ambition has been muted itself, as the vocals suggest. Lewis focuses on his own imperfection and his former love for Owen, mourning his inability to understand how Owen fits into this world, accompanied by a temporary halting of the beat: “I don’t know what your devotion means I don’t know what your devotion means.” The phrase could mean either Lewis’ religious devotion to Owen, Owen’s erotic devotion to Lewis, or the devotion between creator and created. Piano and unmated trumpet blend into the flow of the beat, as do the horns in triumphant octaves; even through uncertainty and regret, everything is decided.

As Lewis calls out to his “Great White Noise,” the beat morphs subtly: the drums place the bass drum note on the second beat of the measure and snare on the third, removing emphasis from the downbeat but creating a cascading effect on the flow. Nearly random insertions of horn notes and glistening syncopation contribute as strings fuse further with the beat, swirling across that melody. Yet when the beat begins to fade, Lewis has to face all the consequences of his actions: as he stabs Owen (you could even say penetrates), the melody moves neutrally and the tension of the beat is slowly defused, like a fog clearing. A few sad melody notes, arpeggios, and scales punctuate it and with a last punch of dissonant horns we arrive in a new key. Winds and strings cycle senselessly in the air as Lewis describes…urinating onto Owen’s course. It’s a ridiculous gesture, and the absurdity of the whole situation continues with a feeling of “Now what.”

The main groove returns with less density, but the largest mystery is why the song hasn’t ended. Lewis does his best to recast killing Owen as his self-determination, and staying uninterruptable removes all guilt from him, keeping him under the “cover of the night.” As if descending from the peak and reaching the body, Lewis sees Owen finally as the author, and everything changes: horns take downward scales, the drums shift, the bass adds a pattern. The last synth plays a prior string/wind melody, but it takes a minor twist as a mass of strings arrive, driving the narrative down to the quiet hell of the next song.

What Do You think Will Happen Now?: standing.

The musical part of the last track is simple. Broken fifths ascend up and down the scale, vocal melody moves back and forth chromatically. Added to the mix is the random percussion of the prepared (or more poetically, predestined) piano, giving the piece an ambiguous sort of meaning. Eventually high notes with doubled vocals add a melody, culminating with doubled words and a last manifesto; yet the song ends on an unresolved chord descending into nothingness, like hope of deciphering has itself died.

The main purpose of the song is the vocal manifesto of Lewis’ state of mind, the mind of a creation without creator. “Despite myself” and his doubts, “I reaffirm my endless devotion” to a world of communal brotherhood and optimism. From the strife of Midnight Directives to the nonsense of Flare Gun and the regret of E is for Estranged, this claim is beyond false. Lewis keeps his doubts in a movement to “debilitate us, delineate us, repackage our words, demystify us”: to stray us from ourselves into the world of clear-cut, scholarly definition. He hides within obscurity and ambiguity and rejects all objective truth. A creation could never know his purpose as a well-defined concept, except…

Except by opening his eyes. Lewis dreamily wanders around the world of Spectrum for examples of dereliction. References to the Norse figures Loki and Surtr suggest the coming end of the world [8]. The sun of reality washes over Lewis, and manages to give him some motivation: “This morning I must get up to see the world around me, what I forgot in seeing ourselves as words upon a paper.” Acceptance fills him, reconciling the sun and the world, leaving behind his dark world, to be “yours.” Yours, meaning both the audience’s and Owen’s, in the darkness of that unresolved final chord. The trials of Heartland have lead to this piece of unmoving, tortured morning, of movement leading to stasis and darkness. Ultimately the creation cannot be divorced from the creator, and Lewis embodies Owen as much as he rejects him. Connection, with oneself and the surrounding environment, is the only hint of a savior.

[8] Interestingly, Midnight Directive's original title was "The End of the World."

Sources

White, Shelley. "Owen Pallett Wears His Heartland On His Sleeve." spinner 14 Jan 2010: n. pag. Web. 1 Apr 2010. .

Hiedemann, Jason. "Fantasy World." Out and About: Chicago 16 Jul 2009: n. pag. Web. 1 Apr 2010.

Chafin, CL. "Blissfully Nerdy." Popmatters 4 Feb 2010: n. pag. Web. 1 Apr 2010.

Carew, Anthony. "Interview: Owen Pallett." About.com: Alternative Music n. pag. Web. 1 Apr 2010. .

Culloty, Shane. "Interview: Owen Pallett." slate 18 Mar 2010: n. pag. Web. 1 Apr 2010. .

Pallett, Owen. Owen Pallett - Heartland. Recording andPrint

Addendum

Pallett focused more heavily on musical flow and symbolic meaning, rather than a distinct narrative; not surprisingly, the order of songs was changed multiple times, lyrics rewritten and recycled, and tracks swapped in and out. Here is the original tracklisting, and the US released version. From Owen from Final Fantasy, Jan 3rd 2010 on fanforums.

4	Red Sun No.5	Midnight Directives	1
X	Wella-Balsam Reverie (aka The Man With No Ankles)	Keep the Dog Quiet	2
X	Scandal at the Parkade	Mt. Alpentine	3
5	Lewis Takes Action	Red Sun No. 5	4
6	The Great Elsewhere	Lewis Takes Action	5
7	Oh Heartland, Up Yours!	The Great Elsewhere	6
8	Lewis Takes Off His Shirt	Oh Heartland, Up Yours!	7
2	Keep the Dog Quiet	Lewis Takes Off His Shirt	8
3	Mt. Alpentine	Flare Gun	9
10	Tryst With Mephistopheles	E is for Estranged	10
1	The End of Time (aka Midnight Directives)	Tryst With Mephistopheles	11
12	What Do You Think Will Happen Now?	What Do You Think Will Happen now?	12

HEARTLAND TRACKLISTING AND LYRICS

Midnight Directives

Cross her off the shortlist.
My blood is a red-winged bird.
The way will be lit by the bridges we burn, oh.
And come, tornado!¹
Carry me away from the croft.
Ruffle my hair, bear my body aloft, oh.

As the cutlass came down on a Saturday night,
Left an un-planted field, left my daughter and wife.
Called away into service, for a clerical life.
Left an un-planted field, left my daughter and wife.

Thought I was a sad-boy.
Now I know, I know, I know I was wrong.
Since you came along, I can see how content I had been.
It'll drive a man crazy to age from the outside in.
But I have a plan, it's a trick with a prick of a pin.

And as the cutlass came down on a Saturday night,
Left an un-planted field, left my daughter and wife.
Called away into service, for a clerical life.
Left an un-planted field, left my daughter and wife.

For a man can be bought, and a man can be sold,
And the price of a hundred thousand unwatered souls
Is a bit of meat and a bit of coal.
It's a bit of meat and a bit of coal.
It's a little bit of meat and coal.

Keep the Dog Quiet

My body is a cage².
This union is cage about a cage about a cage.
And this, and this town too.
I'll see you once in a while but I can't be seen with you.
This place is a narrative mess.
The floor a tangle of bedsheets and battered sundress.
The ink has dried in the well.
The journey once was consequential,
Now: sequential, sequential, sequential, sequential.

When will you silence your hounds?
The eldest sons to the altar of the Eternal Sound.
Their blood is spilled at the dawn.
A nation bound to your will, still, the violin plays on.
Plays its devotional song.
Once it was, once it was so essential,
Now: sequential, sequential, sequential, sequential.

Mt. Alpentine

Lead on, oh horse of mine, we will climb the side of Alpentine.
Lead on, oh horse of mine, we will voice our satisfactions.
Karma is the concatenation of your actions.

Red Sun No. 5³

I'd been living through days
Carrying no burden
But the shit of cattle
And my resignation

Until the sun rose crimson
Crept across my limbs and
I saw that they were earthen
That they decay and worsen

And from my ginger chest, there
Came the sound of thunder
I am not a father
I am not a farmer

I tremble to speak of it.
Held her in my arms and
Pressed her to my heart and
Pressed my hand o'er her lips

I murmured words of his love
I will be his baron
With him I have an ending
With him I have completion
And the cover of night

Lewis Takes Action⁴

I got a message for the acolytes.
I am your man for a wifey fight.
I got a thirst for liquid gold.
I'll bludgeon 'til the body's cold.

The stony hiss of cockatrice has cast us into serfdom.
I close my eyes, and spur Imelda down the mountainside
For a liberated Spectrum.

I took No-Face by his beak and broke his jaw, he'll never speak again.
I took No-Face by his beak and broke his jaw, he'll never speak again.

My every move is guided by the bidding of the singer.
The night is split by the whistle of my amber whip
And the fire from my fingers.

The Great Elsewhere

Talking, what's it good for?
Absolutely nothing.
Wrestle, let's wrestle.
You can pin me to anything.

Thought I saw you in my tea leaves.
Thought I saw you in a forest flame.
I'll fill up the silence with the sound of your holy name.

Knowledge of the sea-ways, knowledge of how the water flows.
Whoever coined the phrase has never had to brave the snow.
I climbed the shroud to the top-sail and I peeked through the glass.
The curvature bisected by a wintry mizzen mast.

The scar upon my stomach, I call it my Flying V⁵.
And every time I show it, I can feel your eyes on me.
How many islands will surrender to the blunderbuss?
And how long must we sail before you show your face to us?

Followed him out to the end of the pier.
"Don't come any closer," he cried, "I am afraid
Of the man I'll become if I lay my
Life down for a people who I don't even care for."
Face to his face, I put my
Hand into his and I tried to tell him, "No,
I've seen his work upon the panes of cathedrals,
In the sweat of the workers and the flight of the seagulls."

My words were drowned out by the sound
Of the motors and rowers, the ship as it ran aground
And from the trees came a thousand soldiers.
I went down on my knees with a spear in my shoulder.
About face, about face, I swam back
To the Victoria⁶. I shiver with the
Memory, memory of the island dwellers
And the indifferences of the Storyteller.

Oh Heartland, Up Yours!⁷

The stars collected.
Each world accounted for⁸.
Freed all the children.
Seems there's nothing more.

If I only had a rowboat, I would row it up to heaven⁹.
And if heaven will not have me, I will take the other option.
I will seek out my own satisfaction.

From the wight lying in the barrow¹⁰,
To the priest with his broken arrows.
There's a method to the madness¹¹.
They will feign an expression of sadness.
A concatenation of locusts,
And the farmers are losing their focus.
On the pitch of the Avenroe grasses
I will sing, sing, sing to the masses
Oh Heartland, up yours!

The hollow voice of our 14th century.
Too much assumption to be taken seriously.

Oh, you wrote me like a Disney kid, in cut-offs and a beater
With a feathered fringe, it doesn't suit a simoniac breeder¹².
Doesn't work, doesn't fly, doesn't handle.

From the wight lying in the barrow,
To the priest with his broken arrows.
There's a method to the madness.
They will feign an expression of sadness.
A concatenation of locusts,
And the farmers are losing their focus.
On the pitch of the Avenroe grasses
I will sing, sing, sing to the masses
Oh Heartland, up yours!

My homeland.
I will not sing your praises here.

Lewis Takes Off His Shirt

As soon as I got on the horse, I forgot about the math.
Forgot about the odds against an adolescent standing up to all of Owen's wrath.
The heat of prairie summer, impossible to take.
I grab the hem and lift the fabric over my sweet head.
I know what you're looking for, and I'm never gonna give it to you.
I'm never gonna give it to you.
I'm never gonna give it to you.

Government rule established by a dazzling light show.
A hegemony armoured with a thousand-watt head and seven inches of echo.
I keep up my velocity, my spurs are in her sides.
I don't know what I'm doing, and it is the only way.
Toward the range I'll ride, singing, I'm never gonna give it to you.
I'm never gonna give it to you.
I'm never gonna give it to you.

"I am overrated," said the sculptress to the sea.
"I've been praised for all the ways the marble leaves the man,
And I was wrong to try and free him."
And as for me, I am a vector, I am muscle, I am bone.
The sun upon my shoulders and the horse between my legs,
This is all I know.

My senses are bedazzled by the parallax of the road.
I concentrate to keep contained the overflow.
My knuckles grip so tightly, my fingers start to bleed.
If what I have is what you need,
I'm never gonna give it to you.
I'm never gonna give it to you.
I'm never gonna give it to you.

Flare Gun¹³

The wella woods of Belvedere.
The peat and moss of Avenroe.
St. Germain's canaries.
The fortress of Alpentine.
Oh my soul, my loyalty is to the East
And Spectral man, and bird, and beast.

Red soil for the taking.
Ruddy women for your brides¹⁴.
All good men of valourous heart,
Consider a new start and sail today for the Heartland.

E Is For Estranged

Boys run like water from the barrel to the trough.
They'll never stop their running.
Gunning for their brothers.
This house is a hostel.
It is peaceful, but it's always emptying.
Boys all want to be someone.

Haven't you heard? I am a flightless bird.
I am a liar, feeding facts to a false fire.
If pathos is borne, borne out of bullshit--in formal attire,
I'll score you a string ensemble¹⁵.

I saw my son at seventeen,
The shutters made projections on his naked frame.
Now at twenty-five,
He simply cannot stay away from the ketamine.
With makeup on his sores,
He spends an hour a day composing little eulogies.
Sometimes he sends me letters,
But it's mostly garbled phrases and apologies.

But haven't you heard? I am a flightless bird.
I am a liar, feeding facts to a false fire.
If pathos is borne, borne out of bullshit--in formal attire,
Cue the Bulgarian men's choir.

Tryst With Mephistopheles

I stumbled on the summit's path.
Clumsy, clumsy.
No paragon am I.
I can't even keep my shoes tied.

I've been in love with Owen ever since
I heard the strains of Psalm 21¹⁶.
Standing between the choirs,
As they sang, "Laudate Dominum, Laudate Dominum".

Damn, I wrote it down, but I left it in the pocket of my other jeans.
Scrawled across the foolscap: "I don't know what your devotion means,
I don't know what your devotion means."

And up, upon the summit I can see
The one I worshipped as a boy.
The Creator, The Great White Noise.
The Great White Noise.

Charged and charging up the ridge.
The chests are empty, the coffers too.
They float in the flood, and so will you, I swear, so will you.

"Your light is spent! Your light is spent!" I cried,
As I drove the iron spike into Owen's eyes.
The sun sped cross the plains like that cinematic moment where
Humanity and nature collide.
When you think, "Everything's gonna be all right,"
Just before the hero gets a bullet in his side.

Whizzing off the clifftop,
Listening for the spatter, thirty floors below.
Down come the vultures.
I will not be your fuel anymore.

Now the author has been silenced, how will they ever decipher me?
I hope they hear these words and are convinced
You never even knew me.

I draw a bruise on your brawny shoulder,
Scratch my fingers over your tattoos.
The author has been removed.

What Do You Think Will Happen Now?

The difficulties of my story:
Despite discomforts, despite myself, I
I reaffirm my endless devotion
To the belief that we're all of value,
We're all of virtue, and so inclined we
Fill up our cups and toast to each other,
And though I listen to the arguments
That most divergent systems employ to

Debilitate us, delineate us,
Repackage our words, demystify us,
I unceasingly affirm my love can
Cannot be measured, cannot be altered.
I know, I know it, I do affirm it
With overzealous obscurantism.
With every word and with every gesture,
I must express it. I can't define it,
But all the same I know I can describe it:

I walk o'er bridges and see the river.
A marble statue the sun has weather'd.
The stubbornness of the overgrowth and
The old memorials covered in snow. We've
Written the way the universe will go.
A righteous white horse¹⁷, a man with a bow¹⁸.
A sharpened bit of the mistletoe¹⁹.
Scissors of fate²⁰ or the fire of Surtur²¹.
Though we're divided, the force of nature
Will put us all in the ground together

This morning I must get up
To see the world around me.
Right away, what I forgot
In seeing ourselves as words upon a paper.

The sun is up.
My arms are wide.
I am a good man, I am yours.

EXTRAS AND B-SIDES TO HEARTLAND

Wella-Balsam Reverie (aka The Man With No Ankles)

Somewhere between a window and my doorstep
I remembered what it was to play, to play, to play
Don't tell me you can't remember
A time before carnal needs
Turned us all into employers and employees

The future is a constant in the world everywhere
But if humans aren't predestined, the future is variable
Well I don't even I don't know what it means, don't know what it means
But a fine figured wife isn't how I'm gonna end my teens

I'll do, upon, upon, your beauty
I'll do, d-do, d-do, my duty
I'll do, I'll do, I'll do my duty
I'll do, d-do, d-do, my duty

I stopped by the river to fish out a fiver
I couldn't stand to see my countenance there
Oh, as the water hit my calves and my ankles
To the back of my legs, to my neck, to my head

Woo. hoo.. ahh....!

I'll do, I'll do, I'll do, my duty
I'll do, d-do, d-do, my duty
I'll do, I'll do, I'll do, my duty
I'll do, d-do, d-do, my duty

Lewis' Dream

Benito was fifteen when he went off to college
I stayed home and tried to go with his best friend
He told me he was gonna cut my neck right across
Then he read Rousseau
Where did he go?

Master comes to me while I'm sleeping
Gives me hell for my overeating
Tells me how I should cut my hair
You think I am only dreaming

But I've arms of bronze and bone
I was born into a loving home
And of all the promises that I have made
There's one I'll never break

Write his name on your chest in a fever
Sing his song to the boats on the river
Heaven's number is seventy-one
Our work has only just begun

With our arms of bronze and bone
We will set our shoulders to the stone
We will lift it, we will bear it 'til our bodies
Our bodies break

A Watery Day

The day I lost my virginity
I made a pot of chicken noodle soup.
Cracked the eggs into a swirling mess.
I ate half and I chucked the rest.

The day the doctor gave me pills
I smirked like a kid with chewing gum
As if the plague was a college acceptance
Or the memory of a brilliant threesome

A letter came in from St. Germain
My mother washed away by two weeks of rain.
The Singer took away my family
But all I felt were his glowin' arms around me

During Easter dinner, the dog died
And I failed, I failed, I failed
And I couldn't even lift the spade

1 Possible reference to the video games Super Mario Bros. 3 or the Legend of Zelda Series. Suggested by scarychips on Dec 25 2009 on Fanforums

2 Pallett arranged strings for Arcade Fire’s second LP, Neon Bible, the last track of which is called My Body is a Cage.

3 “Called ‘No. 5’ because, like Chanle No. 5, it was the fifth version that made the cut.” http://drownedinsound.com/in_depth/4138861-owen-palletts-track-by-track-guide-to-heartland?relevant-artist

4 This song contains reference to almost every track on the Spectrum, 14^th Century EP. “Cockatrice,” “Imelda,” and “No-Face” are both titles/characters, “Spectrum” is used to name the setting, and “The Singer” is used to reference Owen (as in The Butcher). Suggested on the fanforums.

5 A Flying V is a model of electric violin. Suggested by Peter Heke and joebonte on Feb 15^th 2010 on Fanforums.

6 The Victoria is the name of Ferdinan Magellan’s ship. He was killed on an expedition much like Lewis’. Suggested by ben on Feb 15 2010 on Fanforums. See also: “As a kid I was really into Magellan and this song re-imagines that bit when he was killed by a Filipino chieftain” http://drownedinsound.com/in_depth/4138861-owen-palletts-track-by-track-guide-to-heartland?relevant-artist

7 In October 1977, the English punk group Xray Spex released their game-changing single “Oh Bondage, Up Yours!”

8 Collecting stars and traveling between worlds is a constant game mechanic in the Super Mario series. Suggested by Peter Heke on Feb 15 2010 on Fanforums.

9 On Radiohead’s June 2001 album Amnesiac, Track two, Pyramid Song, contains the lyric: “We all went to heaven in a little rowboat.” Suggested by Alyssa on Feb 15 2010 on Fanforums.

10 Very direct reference to a sequence in JRR Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings.

11 Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act 2 Scene 2.

12 Slang in some queer communities for heterosexuals. Suggested by emlyi on Feb 17 2010 on Fanforums.

13 Each of these song titles is in some way derivative of some other fantasy-related or fantastical concept.

Belvedere is “beautiful view” in Italian, and is often used as an architecture term, and for various brands.

Avenroe shows up in this poem about truth and action: “But such deep secrets willingly I leave / To grand philosophers. I'll forward go / In my proposed way. If they conceive / There's but one soul (though many seem in show) / Where in these living bodies here below / Doth operate (some such opinion / That Learned Arab held hight Aven-Roe) / How comes't to pass that she's so seldome known / In her own self? In few she thinks her self but one.” A Platonicall Song of the Soul, translated by Henry More.

St. Germain is a chateau in France.

Alpentine takes the adjective alpine, meaning mountainous.

14 See Blue Imelda for Owen’s thoughts on the relationship between farming and women.

15 Pallett is one of the foremost arrangers on the classical/indie circuit.

16 The psalm contains these words: “Though they plan evil against you, / though they devise mischief, they will not succeed. / For you will put them to flight; / you will aim at their faces with your bows.” Notice the double meaning of bows, and Owen’s face wound later in the song. Suggested by joebonte on Feb 15^th 2010 on Fanforums.

17 Horses show up in Lewis Takes Off His Shirt and Lewis Takes Action (through Blue Imelda), possibly alluding to his sexuality (“the horse between my legs / this is all I know”)

18 Violin bow?

19 Loki used mistletoe to kill Baldur. Suggested by ren on 16 Feb 2010 on Fanforums

20 The weavers of fate, Atropos. Suggested by ren on 16 Feb 2010 on Fanforums.

21 Surtr commanded fire in Norse mythology. Suggested by ben on 16 Feb 2010 on Fanforums