Final Fantasy is the musical persona of video game-obsessed Toronto native Owen Pallett, whose new album, "He Poos Clouds," is a dazzlingly sophisticated and assured song suite composed for string quartet, piano and percussion. There's a skittishness to these songs that is both exhilarating and maddening, a kind of coltish shyness, as if they might spook if you try to get close too quickly, and they zip by with a facile, virtuosic sheen, clearly the product of a deliberate aesthetic decision both sonic (the whole record has a thin, plastic, somewhat antiseptic sound) and compositional. Download "Song Song Song" and this Salon exclusive of "This Lamb Sells Condos" to get a taste, but this is definitely an album that deserves to be heard in its entirety.
-- T.B.
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