Owen Pallett — Heartland

Sometimes it's worth waiting a while to get something truly great.

Owen Pallett has more than proven that with Heartland, his third studio album that comes nearly four years after the release of his 2006 Polaris Music Prize-winning He Poos Clouds sophomore album.

While He Poos Clouds was already an achievement in experimental, classically-influenced pop music, Heartland takes its musical ideas and instrumentation and expands on them in a way that makes the disc seem more of a fully-realized, cohesive work. In short, Heartland bests it.

Part of that comes from the fact that Heartland is a concept album (composers back in the day would have referred to this type of work as "program music") about a farmer named Lewis who lives in a fictional community named Spectrum and becomes violent.

Pallett's played more with keyboards on the album, and that only augments his sound. Set next to woodwinds and strings, they give Heartland a timelessness, ensuring it sounds firmly rooted in the past while looking at the future.

Heartland is full of lush, full, soaring instrumentation from start to finish. Particular stand-outs include "Lewis Takes Off His Shirt," which draws a bit from Karl Jenkins, and "Oh Heartland, Up Yours!" with its vaguely Philip Glass-ish instrumentation (though it's far less boring than a Philip Glass score). The staccatoed bits on "Flare Gun" show clear influence from Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique.

But forget that. All the songs demonstrate Pallett's abilities not just as a songwriter and composer, but a keen lyricist.

It would've been quite easy for Pallett to quickly churn something out post-He Poos Clouds. Perhaps this is why it took four years to create Heartland. But quality's always preferable over prolificity in the long run, and it's going to be very, very hard for there not to be a Polaris Music Prize repeat for Pallett with this one.

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