Even if you’ve never heard of him, you will have heard him. Owen Pallett is the man behind the strings on both of the Arcade Fire albums; he wrote the huge Scott Walker-esque musical backdrop to the Last Shadow Puppets’ album and has worked with The Hidden Cameras, The Pet Shop Boys and Mika, amongst others. His name first quite literally struck a chord here when he orchestrated one of Suitcase Orchestra’s Top 10 Albums of 2009 Luxury Pond’s eponymous album.

While hiding in the sleeve notes of these other albums, Pallett has previously released two of his own albums using the name Final Fantasy, Has A Good Home and the less than brilliantly titled He Poos Clouds. For this album, he has ditched the Final Fantasy moniker and is just plain old Owen Pallett.

The orchestration, recorded with the Czech Symphony in Prague, is very much in evidence here, though rarely in a straightforward form. Strings and horns are looped, chopped up and generally messed about with to make a gloriously unconventional pop record but one which never strays into avant-garde territory or ever becomes less than very listenable.

Keep The Dog Quiet comes over as a Faithless track, stripped of the drums, it’s pulsing use of strings acting as its own rhythm section. Elsewhere, Red Sun No.5 sounds like a reconstructed Pet Sounds era Beach Boys song while Lewis Takes Off His Shirt comes very close to Pallett’s stated aim of ‘putting so many notes on the page that the paper turned black’, with its layers of electronica, strings  and flute which builds and builds to an ecstatic crescendo.

The Lewis in question is the narrator of the album, a young ultra-violent farmer in the fictional world of Spectrum. As I said, it’s a very unconventional pop record.

Heartland by Owen Pallett is available now on Domino.

Owen Pallett’s Myspace is here.