Final Fantasy’s Owen Pallett lives a life that most musicians could only dream about. In the last few years the talented Torontonian has worked with The Hidden Cameras, Arcade Fire, Beirut, Grizzly Bear, The Last Shadow Puppets, and The Pet Shop Boys to name just a few. He also won the inaugural Polaris Music Prize for Final Fantasy’s sophomore album, He Poos Clouds released in 2006. 

Plays to Please is the second EP that Final Fantasy has released in the last few months and is a tribute to Toronto’s Alex Lukashevsky and his band Deep Dark United. The six songs featured here were performed with the 35 piece St. Kitts Orchestra and all sound as if they were recorded with the theatrical stage in mind. It is easy to picture Pallett walking through a park on a summer’s day, twirling an umbrella resting on his shoulder with cartoon blue birds fluttering all around him while singing lead off track, “Horsetail Feathers”. “Nun or Bawd” contains the amusing rhyming couplet of “I don’t care if she’s an alcoholic and a possible genius like Jackson Pollock”. If one were to ignore the words, the music accompaniment would fit very nicely on a children’s record between “Skip to my Lou” and “There’s a Hole in the Bucket”.