Last October, Owen Pallett wrote three words which made my pulse race: ‘Heartland, it exists’. (I should clarify that whilst album releases don’t usually give me palpitations, I make an exception for Pallett).

You may have heard of the Canadian singer/violinist under his previous game-related guise, Final Fantasy. His debut, Has a Good Home, caused ripples of excitement among self-professed ‘new folk’ circles with its playful melodies and charmingly ostentatious string arrangements. His next release, He Poos Clouds, unleashed a far more forceful, orchestral sound upon its listeners, but Pallett remained as delightfully gamesome (no pun intended), basing eight of the album’s songs around the eight schools of magic in Dungeons and Dragons. Since 2006, Pallett has remained somewhat on the peripheries of the independent music scene, nursing his steadily growing fan-base with impressively dexterous live performances. But here it is: Heartland really does exist, and having shed the skin of Final Fantasy, Owen Pallett, a fully-matured musical presence, exists as well.

Heartland is ambitious, to say the least. Once again, Pallett reveals the vivacity of his imagination, forging the fictional world “Spectrum”, inhabited by the “ultra-violent farmer” Lewis, who narrates his struggles against his creator, called – that’s right – Owen Pallett. Although the album is Pallett’s most instrumentally verbose to-date, there is also a fresh sense of subtlety and restraint. The soaring arrangements contribute to an atmosphere at-once epic and introspective.

Stand-out tracks include “Midnight Directives”, in which Pallett boasts a masterfully choreographed interspersion of militant drum rolls and painfully intricate finger-picking, and “The Great Escape”, a delightful conflicted track which holds a complex electronic tempo amidst a crescendo of virtuoso violin and piano accompaniments. Pallett combines his background in classical composition with an irreverent thirst for experimentation, so that the album occasionally teeters on the brink of complete discord, but somehow manages a compelling coherence. Pallett’s choir-boy vocals indubitably tie the piece together, tirelessly chiming out lively pop melodies. His tone is sometimes triumphant, as in the compulsively listenable “Tryst with Mephistopheles”, and sometimes atmospheric and haunting, floating amidst the off-beat rhythms of “E is for Estranged”.

In Lewis’ tirades against the omnipotence of his creator, there is a mischievous relevance to the ingenious agility of Pallett’s art. Heartland taunts its listeners with dizzying magnitude, but always remains tightly manoeuvred and controlled, so that when Lewis sings, “My every move is guided by the bidding of the singer”, I, for one, identify.