Heartland

With hindsight, the demise of Final Fantasy was entirely predictable. Sure, the official cause of death was some mumbled notice about wanting to avoid confusion when Heartland became the first FF release to hit Japan, lest the locals start using copies as chocobo lures. But really, in recent years the name of the string arranger Owen Pallett has become vastly more recognisable than his recording artist alias. Extraordinarily graceful and full bodied the looped solo string arrangements on He Poos Clouds may have been, but Final Fantasy’s second album was still an intimate, oddball work, with everything besides the strings muffled, distant and shrill, strange, dissonant tales of childhood crushes on the dude out of Zelda punctuated by bangs and silence.

If you're lucky, you might already know this guy as Final Fantasy. His reasons for dropping that name are probably boring and copyright-related, but still: The name change seems healthy on whole other extra-legal levels. I've never known anyone not to be wowed by Final Fantasy's live show, and Final Fantasy's live show is just Owen Pallett: the guy himself, a violin, and a loop pedal. It's about as solo as anything gets-- a performance, not a project. Stepping out under his own name feels like an acknowledgement of this, as if Pallett's ready to cast aside the modesty of having a "project"-- it's just this thing I've been working on-- and present himself, fully upright, as an artist.