Owen Pallett
Occupation
Musician
60 First Acts Confirmed For Melt! Festival 2013
Posted on14 February 2013
Owen Pallett, A Swedish Love Story EP Review
By Nick Gale in Music Reviews on 11 October 2010
There's an unresolved tension at the heart of A Swedish Love Story, the new EP by talented multi-instrumentalist and sometime Arcade Fire collaborator Owen Pallett. On the one hand, Pallett seems interested in writing songs with many of the hallmarks of conventional pop music. The four tracks on show here contain some memorable melodies, are composed from a few simple elements, and are for the most part unabashedly upbeat. Pallett is an indie kid at heart, though, and it shows. It shows in the title of the EP, which is named after an old Swedish film inspired by Czech new-wave cinema. It shows in the content of the lyrics, which address such well-worn pop cliches as, um, determinism and the possibility that all human actions are a result of external causes ('The future is a constant/In the world of free will'). It also shows in his employment of long, rambling song structures and rejection of verse/chorus/verse dynamics. The result of this is four slightly disappointing hybrids, pop songs disguised as indie songs and indie songs pretending to be pop songs, stripped of the best features of both.
Owen Pallett, Heartland Album Review
By Dom Gourlay in Music Reviews on 04 January 2010
Review of Owen Pallett's album Heartland released through Domino