Oh hey an actual music post

[petronia]

Beirut - Cliquot
Final Fantasy - Took You Two Years To Win My Heart
Stars - Your Ex-Lover Is Dead (Final Fantasy Mix)



[up arrow] That is Owen Pallett. I learnt my lesson with PWolf and from now on there will be photo references of any band/musician/whatever anytime there is over-analysis, not just when I go see them live. I am especially looking forward to posting pics of Ricardo Villalobos as that cat be hi-lar-i-ous.

The theme is "songs that involve Owen Pallett out of Final Fantasy, and are also sad waltzes about the end of relationships." Final Fantasy, to recap, is intricate violin-based indiepop by a dude from Toronto who did all the strings arrangements for the Arcade Fire (among other less-useful references). There are no basslines. The lyrics (literally or metaphorically) revolve around:

• videogame nerd-dom
• faggotry, with a minor in Mishima
• Canadiana

Basically it's kind of like listening to Joanna Newsom's gay otaku oniisan.[1] Needless to say I like this stuff a lot but I can't believe it exists, and I can't believe it won the Polaris Prize. Srsly, only in Canada. It feels like some kind of judgment on my lifestyle. XD;

I got to like Owen Pallett's work for other bands first, which I don't think is just a function of the aforementioned lack of bass - he's obviously the sort of creative personality who works best under preexisting constraints. If he were writing on LJ he'd be asking for drabble prompts constantly.[2] When there's no other band there saying do this and do that he sets arbitrary parameters for himself, which is actually what the whole "one song for each of the D&D schools of magic" etc. rigmarole is about, not the Melt Wizard sort of hommage-rendering. When there is a band he's very good at, not submerging his sound, but turning it into what it's required to be. Even when the requirement is nebulous. The Stars remix is 10x better than the original in that it reaches through the drumbeats and drama to find the sadness. All the time you thought I was sad / I was trying to remember your name; and she so defiant, not knowing she meant so little. Plus it does sound like Jon Brion, with the piano (about the only thing P4k got right in its otherwise DED RONG pan, because the whole remix album happens to be grebt).

The Beirut album (I'll write about Beirut in some other entry) absorbs me in part because it feels collaborative. I'm thinking of Electronic, here, how it's possible to hear Sumner and Marr and Tennant as separate abstract entities in a given song and how totally weird that is. XD Part of it being that the tracks on The Flying Club Cup were mostly laid down before the strings were arranged, I think, and part of it being Beirut's violin section is way more technically proficient than the rest of the band. XD Like, in a really obvious way (cf. "In The Mausoleum"). Not that LOL HIPSTERS LEARN TO PLAY FASTER isn't part of the charm of Gulag Orkestar regardless - of indie as a whole, insofar as it inherits from punk. Unlike Christgau I won't call it "detournement" because that word means something else.

So yeah, Final Fantasy sounding more Beirut than Beirut does all over the album, and "Cliquot" sort of makes me wish Pallett would help a fella out and write all the lyrics, though he'd probably have to tone down the rampant ghei before he gives Zach Condon an untimely heart attack. ...Memes are funny things. This idea of "plague songs" that may or may not have started with the 4AD project, then it was Patrick Wolf saying he wanted to write a whole album about the Black Death, except everything PWolf says about songs he hasn't written yet always turns out to be bullshit, so in the end it was Owen Pallett who wrote it. For Beirut. I actually cannot get over this song, it's too depressing. XD I've mentally elaborated some sort of AU fanfic(?!) set in Dante's Italy in which Owen Pallett is a spoony bard who gets the bubonic plague then dies in a fire. I think the song triggered a relapse of my trauma from those R.A. MacAvoy novels.

Compared to that "Took You Two Years..." comes off as normal, heartache-wise. It's really straightforward; I just like waltzes. XD



[1] I'm not just mocking, their work evolves in parallel. Has a Good Home is to He Poos Clouds as Milk-Eyed Mender is to Ys: the former cute, hooky, low-key and disparate, the latter conceptual, orchestral, and unified in scope. I like the pop albums better. XD

[2] Actually I find Owen Pallett sympathetic in interviews because he reminds me irresistably of People In Fandom. XD The whole self-aware but uncontrollably knee-jerk self-deprecation raised to a fine art schtick. GOD STFU, IT IS SO THE BEST STORY TRACK ON THE ALBUM.

Comments

[arboretum]

haha Owen Pallett ♥.... I love reading your music posts, and I didn't have that Stars remix before, so nabbed it, and thanks. :]

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Ha, glad you got something out of it - this is way more wankage than this LJ needs, I'm totally self-indulging here. XD;

[arboretum]

isn't self-indulgence the whole point of lj!

whatever, it's content as long as you're indulging someone else, too, and I feel indulged, pls don't stop. XDD

[one-if-by-land.livejournal.com]

I've seen final fantasy around everywhere lately, but I've never given them a listen, so thanks for the write-up~&hearts'

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Hit me up if you decide you want more! *eyebrow waggle*

[one-if-by-land.livejournal.com]

sabina, I can't take final fantasy seriously. XD they are like beirut's geeky cousin forced to live in the basement.

[motorbike.livejournal.com]

Minors in Mishima compel me right off the bat, I mean I accidentally minored in him myself; note how well THAT went. FF also gets bonus points for "biggest pain in the ass to search for on bittorrent" and that excellent CN tower song that only Torontoans could ever make head or tail of.

OH OH

[motorbike.livejournal.com]

PS DO U LIEK TEGAN AND SARA REMIXES

Re: OH OH

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I do! I've only got one though, a - Rentals remix?

And the one about condo developments in metro Toronto, and the one about CanLit, and. I'm pretty sure the un-online-findability is intentional, actually, in that "well I'll write it but filtered to THREE PEOPLE so I can pretend it doesn't exist" way.

[subterrain.livejournal.com]

If he were writing on LJ he'd be asking for drabble prompts constantly

Naaaaw, god I WISH. But I really like this analysis of him - I think you're right. He takes a lot from collaboration, which is a really admirable and excellent trait in a solo artist. And somehow I wonder if his self-deprecation is partially a function of the gay? Just in that as a fringe element suddenly embraced and lauded by the mainstream, he feels the need to flaunt and apologise simultaneously. Weirdly, I seem to remember him saying that music shouldn't be political, while still saying his sexuality is an integral part of his own songs. Again like fandom: the gay is suddenly unpolitical, but just accepted.

Yay for your essays! I'm looking forward to your take on Beirut.

essay the second, more disjointed than the first

[petronia.livejournal.com]

(As long as we're on the "psychoanalyzing total stranger" tip) I would guess it has to do with being a middle child, probably! It is so the "ignored kid halfway down the row of extended reconstituted family" personality. The facile explanations here are gay, Canadian, or middle child, and Rufus Wainwright sort of blows the first two out of the water by existing. XD

Less facetiously - the sexuality is there, he doesn't front, if the love song is 1st person POV it's about a boy and that's it, but it's sort of... on totally equal footing with the refs to Forgotten Realms. Which he is also not frontin' about. So it basically is The Sound Of Fandom, yeah. XD There was one interview where he talked about it a bit more - IIRC that in his opinion the art made by homosexuals was inherently different from the art made by heterosexuals, one can always tell which is which, because at the base of it if you come out as gay you've made a break with mainstream society that's destructive - though hopefully creatively destructive, a la punk rock. So what you're looking for is not gay love/sex or penises or whatever but that element of destruction.

It's an interesting idea that I'm not sure I buy as a generalization, but it's prolly a good way to think about the Final Fantasy project. XD Like, there's really nothing camp there, and not a lot of cock, but your money wouldn't be on this stuff being made by a straight guy. Because of the ballsy factor of looping no-bassline violin singing in this mild high pitch until all of a sudden he starts screaming. Destructiveness, shoot-self-in-foot. It's something that Owen Pallett seems conflicted about, actually (or not so much conflict as creative tension, like the self-deprecation): he keep saying he hates the love=death thing in gay art, and he comes down hard on Mishima, but he can't seem to stop writing songs in which people die horribly. XD;

[subterrain.livejournal.com]

Change 'destruction' to 'an inherant level of disenfranchisement and cleaving from the norm' and I'm totally with him on that.

(I mean, not to confuse the difference between 'gay art' and 'arts about the gays' - I am already fully uncomfortable with my exploitation and fetishization of a minority, much less so than any copyright crap in non-rpf fandom.)

But is he really the only one out there without a bassline? And is that so deviant that he equates it with your traditional gay suicidism? Where does that leave PWolf, who makes really good, but overall fairly standard pop, and doesn't use pronouns (just glitter)? A sell-out? Obviously not - he's doing way weirder stuff than Final Fantasy, if you look at it from the mainstream pov, you just can't always hear it in every individual song.

So possibly we need to include visuals of the actual act in the equation. The visuals for FF being: one dude, consistently sleevess and gawky, working his ass off up on stage - essentially performing high-level spatial (?) reasoning beyond the level of most of the audience - and translating that to recognizable music. The most interesting thing to me is that he is not getting lost in the music, he is not playing intuitively or songs from his ~*heart*~. It's structured, it's mathematical, it's memorized. It contradicts what we traditionally think of as art. Have you seen the video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5RAw5otS-w) of him singing Cliquot at a Beirut show? He leaves before the song's over - it's like, without the cover of constant industriousness, he is lost and exposed onstage.

I lost my point, somewhere. ALL I MEAN IS THAT IT'S ADORABLE AND SEXY.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Patrick Wolf is just what he defines himself as, bless'im, namely a pop star. His source of creative tension (one of them) is reconciling that poptimist gestalt - in which eg. there's no such thing as "selling out" - with his also-instinctive neo-rockist prizing of authenticity and self-expression. And that's just him, his fans aren't on the same page yet. XD Whereas Owen Pallett is very much indie-as-a-way-of-life, defining himself within a scene and the scene's expectations. (The collaborative bent is a factor; by own admission PWolf is pants at being in a band, unless they all take orders from him. XD)

I see both these choices as political, actually - indie obviously, but pop too - pop being lesser-prestige because it's feminine and queer, whereas rock guitar is the sound of white male hegemony. That's uhh the framework I'm used to when thinking about t3h anti-rockist ideal, and pop-ism is the aggro in-yr-face variant of that. It sums up PWolf's school of thought pretty well.

Back to Pallett - all those things that he does come from the Western classical tradition! That's just how classical music is played, you have to internalize and reproduce all the structure and memorization and almost-math before you can get to the emotion. What it does is contradict the accepted measures of quality in the indie rock worldview - self-expression over technique etc. And given that indie is where Pallett is coming from, it is a bit... suicidal may be overboard. XD I'm not saying he's a drama queen in his own mind, but CONTRARY TO EXPECTATIONS MOST PEOPLE DO DIG IT. (Starting with his bf? Wasn't that the story?) But the fact that he can be like "fuck it, it's all a stupid gimmick, I'll be over here with my violin" is probably what allows him to get on with it up there.

But I may be reading too much into this XD (GEEZ YOU THINK, WHAT COULD GIVE YOU THAT IDEA) - I have a fraught relationship with classical so I think it took me longer to get wid it than most people! And PWolf's music is really obvious to me, but that's because it may as well have been custom-tailored to my tastes. In any case my thesis is THEY ARE BOTH TOTALLY PUNK ROCK IN THEIR OWN WAY ♥, as proven by the fact that they're both fans of Joanna Newsom, and she is also totally punk rock, so there you are.

(Besides the FF thread itself, I've only come across Owen Pallett on ILM on a Joanna Newsom thread, arguing about some modern composer I'd never heard of. I gathered he demolished the other guy but I didn't understand a word of it. XD)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Oh & yes I saw that video! And thought the samething. XD (P.S. is this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGIiutD1YdQ&feature=PlayList&p=555252AB8AF33DE6&index=0) your church? I think the most recent stage of my YTube addiction is stalking the gigs people on my flist went to.)