{"id":20312,"date":"2020-05-27T00:30:00","date_gmt":"2020-05-27T04:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/panm360.com\/?post_type=records&p=20312"},"modified":"2020-05-27T09:43:28","modified_gmt":"2020-05-27T13:43:28","slug":"island-owen-pallett","status":"publish","type":"records","link":"https:\/\/panm360.com\/en\/records\/island-owen-pallett\/","title":{"rendered":"Island"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Toronto\u2019s award-winning articulator of elevated pop, Owen Pallett, returns after too long a wait (his preceding proper album, In Conflict<\/em>, came out in 2014). With not one but two albums on the same day, in fact, to help make up for the delay. The score to the documentary Spaceship Earth<\/em> (read our review here)<\/a> was on everyone\u2019s spring-release radar, but his own Island<\/em> arrived to great, and happy, surprise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The contents, to be sure, aren\u2019t entirely unanticipated. The creative voice he established with 2006\u2019s consequential He Poos Clouds<\/em>, the pleasantly eccentric conflation of classical, folk, and pop, remains in place here. The album\u2019s built out of a batch of songs Pallett put together on an acoustic guitar, and some don\u2019t stray far from that, like the sun-dappled \u201cTransformer\u201d. The material made its way to Abbey Road studios and orchestral arrangements, however, so matters are scaled up for songs like the sweeping \u201cIn Darkness\u201d and \u201cA Bloody Morning\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The stirring and memorable \u201cParagon of Order\u201d reflects the most rewarding balance of the near and the wide on the record, nicely representative of Pallett\u2019s capacity for clear expressions of both intimacy and grandeur, often in the same moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n