Owl City - Ocean Eyes Review

Adam Young lists God, optimism, and G-rated movies among his biggest influences. Such innocence will surely get beaten out of him in a back alley one day, but for now, it's made this 23-year-old's one-man band, Owl City, the fourth most-played act on MySpace, where teen girls eat that stuff up. For good reason: Young's second set of lush, Postal Service-indebted electronic pop, Ocean Eyes, is so daydream-ready, you might forgive him for admitting out loud that he'd ''rather pick flowers instead of fights.'' The most thrilling part? Check out the soaring chorus on ''Dental Care.'' The least thrilling part? The fact that it's about dental care. B+...full text Future pop has fast become a term used for acts that entwine pop melodies and characteristics with experimental, electronic beats; often including either a synth or a keyboard and usually throwing in a hint of trance/house danceability for good measure.

La Roux walks the line pretty straightly, as does Frankmusik and surprisingly, so too does the once promising, now disappointing Owl City.

Sure he sounds like Ben Gibbard (scarily so at certain points) and at times, even the rhythm could be compared to some of The Postal Service's lighter work but nothing, and we mean absolutely nothing, is as intelligently made on here as anything from TPS's lone record. Instead, we're expected to digest a boring, almost embarrassingly simple attempt that shows an artist trying to fit into an ever changing musical world.

Whether it's the approachable-punk of Gallows that the public particularly fancy one week or the screaming-dance nightmare that is Enter Shikari, it's plain to see that the over the last five years or so, popular music has enveloped and absorbed bits and pieces of the growing alternative scene in order to keep things 'fresh'. What Owl City has decided to undertake is an attempt to fit in with the fluoreso-coloured new comers and try to offer a less offensive take on it. He succeeds in that sense but it's still an unattractively bumpy journey through mostly cheesy, over-produced territory and falls miles below our previous expectations....full text The third album from MySpace phenom Owl City, a.k.a., Adam Young, is pristine pop electronica: synths and strings meld seamlessly into dreamy, summery atmospherics (with guest vocals from Matt Theissen of Christian emo mainstays Relient K). But while Young's compositions occasionally flirt with the nuanced melodicism of Jimmy Tamborello or Jona Bechtolt, he rarely lets even the slightest risky idea emerge. The result is a skillfully crafted record that feels blissfully monochromatic. As Young puts it, "If the bombs go off, the sun will still be shining."...full text