Pitchfork

Around this time last year, Owen Pallett-- a touring sideman and string arranger for the Arcade Fire and Hidden Cameras-- released Has a Good Home, his first record as Final Fantasy. For an album assembled in approximately six days, it contained a surprising amount of good material: elegant, sophisticated, and generally winsome pop songs constructed from violin and loop pedals. A year later, Squaresoft has yet to send a cease-and-desist order, and Pallett's emerged with something far grander than his modest debut.

He Poos Clouds. The title is meant as a compliment (cf. shit that don't stink), and maybe also as a way of cutting through the seriousness of the thing itself-- 10 compositions for a chamber ensemble including strings, piano, harpsichord, percussion, and voice. Work through Pallett's lyrics and there's the more serious possibility that this album is about suicide. These songs are populated by characters both fantastical and hopeless: frigid young professionals, an impotent real-estate broker, Lazarus, a Japan-obsessed suicidal, "the Pooka," a lost teenage daughter, and Jenna, who "dreams of being physically able/ To behead herself at the dining room table." They talk to themselves (and occasionally one another) in arch, pithy exclamations, which Pallett, in print, riddles with explanation points. What's dating? "Tell lies, tell dirty lies, tell diggory lies/ Until you're lying in his bed!"

There are grand gestures in the music, too, starting with the unbearably tense sequence of rising notes that closes the first song, irritating you to the point of emotional sensitivity. Some are full of good feeling, like the opening of "Song Song Song"-- a clatter of vigorous stick-on-wood percussion that only gradually steps its way up into pizzicato harmonies. Others are packed with something more anguished, like when the broker in "This Lamb Sells Condos" bickers with his spouse: Pallett does spiteful crosstalk ("I feed you every morning and ask so little") under what sounds like a children's choir urgently singing designer labels ("Hedi Slimane and Agnes B/ I'm not content"). Still more urgency in "Many Lives -> 49 MP", as Pallett sings around an insistent violin lead and others shout violently from the back of the room.

Pallett's combination of pop idiom and classical practice is fluid and natural; he sounds perfectly at home here, miles from the self-conscious "conceptual" way indie acts usually take up string quartets. But this may or may not be an album for classicists. Pallett's arrangements are terrific in their rhythmic tangles of strings, pushing and weaving in odd spots, but they're also-- intentionally or unintentionally-- the tiniest bit monochrome, heavy in staccato undertows and the same arch feeling as the album's title. (Arch in tone and arched in eyebrows, especially when the pizzicato comes out.) Pallett's voice can also lag behind his writing, and its recording here is naggingly lacking in crispness; right when you want a strong voice swelling over the strings, it can go muddied and dull and get dragged underneath. But where Has a Good Home was promising, He Poos Clouds seems like the real thing: No matter the title, there's an ambition here, and a dedication to Pallett's own mission, that's a joy to hear. This is, in a word, fierce-- it can engage you on a level most albums can't, and digging through the lyrics seems to reveal...well, something. Which isn't as common a situation as we might hope.