Ryan's Owen Palett Review

A few years ago Time Magazine put together a list of the most important gadgets of the past 35 years, and one of the top ones on the list was Sony's Walkman. It's easy now to underestimate how influential the Walkman was, but there's an argument that it entirely changed the way we appreciate music – albums had become truly portable after its introduction, and the Walkman allowed people to use their favourite albums as the soundtrack of experiences in their lives. The counter-argument of this, though, is that it's changed it in a way that has ruined music as an art form: if music is a soundtrack of an experience, rather than an experience itself, it no longer carries the same artistic weight that it was for centuries.

It's not an argument that I'm fond of; I think that the question of whether or not something is 'art' is more dependant on the circumstances under which it's created, rather than those under which it is consumed. But the changes that technology brings to art, and the idea of music as a soundtrack, rather than an experience, is something that has been weighing on my mind of late. This is especially true as I've been thinking of several of the Polaris Prize nominees that I've been listening to over the past weeks – I thought of it when listening to Besnard Lakes and Caribou, but listening to Owen Palatt's Heartland has brought that line of thought to the forefront more than either of those earlier albums did.

It sounds dismissive to say that, and I don't want to be completely dismissive of Heartland, because on a technical level it's a well-recorded and performed album, and it's clear that Owen Palett and the rest of the people working on the album knew what they were doing. But the entire thing is reminisent, to me, like the soundtrack of a Disney film, especially in songs like Midnight Detectives and The Great Elsewhere. From what I've read that isn't Palett's goal, and that he was actually attempting to create this intricate, layered narrative that deals with all sorts of philosophical and spiritual questions. While it's all well and good to do that, what Palett didn't do was create anything that would draw me into its narrative or force me to ask those questions. Instead I'd rather be doing something else while listening to this.