It's easy to draw parallels between Owen Pallett, the singer and violinist who formerly performed under the stage name Final Fantasy, and other popular indie musicians and bands. Pallett first gained recognition for arranging the strings on Arcade Fire's breakout 2004 album, Funeral. He has a live performance style that incorporates violin, vocals and electronic loop pedal (a Yak-Bak-like device that allows performers to play a short passage and then repeat it while layering new passages over the original passage), quite similar to Andrew Bird, another violin-playing singer. Pallett has often discussed his love for the band Xiu Xiu, an art rock band led by singer/songwriter Jamie Stewart, a musician who, like Pallett, incorporates homosexual themes into much of his music.

It's hard to really get at Pallett's work with these verbal comparisons, however. As one might expect given the stage name he discarded this past December, Pallett's music is filled with imagery from the world of video games. References to the Legend of Zelda series and, of course, the Final Fantasy series litter his lyrics. In "Illusion Song," a live favorite that resurfaced as the title track to Pallett's 2006 album He Poos Clouds, Pallett sings: "Gotta fulfill the seven prophecies/ Gotta take care of my grandmother/ Gotta rescue Michael from the White Witch/ Gotta find and kill my shadow self/ Gotta dig up every secret seashell."

Listeners might catch the references to C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia ("the White Witch") and the Nintendo Game Boy title The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening ("secret seashell"); this sort of thing is par for the course with Pallett's music.

It's no surprise that Pallett's stage name, which he gave up because of copyright disputes, would be the title of a cultishly popular fantastical role-playing game. I'm certainly happy to see Pallett lose the videogame mask, even if his game-obsessed youth still inspires much of his music.

The theatrical, wispy vocals and videogame lyrics belie Pallett's age and experience-at 30 years old, Pallett's first album, Has a Good Home, was released in 2005. Since then, he's released a second and a third album (January's Heartland), performed with orchestras and contributed instrumental arrangements to albums like Grizzly Bear's Yellow House (2006), Beirut's The Flying Club Cup (2007) and the Mountain Goats' The Life of the World to Come (2009).

Though a collaboration between an indie musician and an orchestra may seem contrived when it comes to some rock stars, Pallett's background in string arrangement and violin performance (he studied classical violin for much of his childhood) makes him an ideal bridge between the indie realm and the world of classical music.

This coming Tuesday, Pallett will perform at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Snowblink, a folky Canadian band, will open. (The online events magazine Flavorpill.com offered a description of the group, saying, "As Snowblink, songbird Daniela Gesundheit makes hushed and eerily gorgeous music with a rotating cast of musicians, backup singers, and assorted whisperers.")

Some concertgoers may be put off by Pallett's somewhat infantile fantasy novel lyrics; his skills as a musician and composer make up for poetic weaknesses. And though it may not be the avant-garde parlor trick it once was, the use of live tape loops is truly fascinating to watch.

If you have $18 and some free time on Tuesday night, the ICA will be the place to be. If you're like me, you may be tired of arriving early to standing-room-only rock clubs like the Paradise Rock Club in Boston in order to get a good spot, then suffering through a dull opener on your feet with dozens of fellow concertgoers crowded around.

The ICA, whose current building was designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and completed in 2006, has a beautiful auditorium with glass curtain walls along two sides cantilevered over the harbor. Most importantly, although the show is general admission, the auditorium is seated.