Review Summary: I'm only going to say this once, and I truly mean it: Owl City is everything that's wrong with music.
I have to give it to Adam Young: despite having an almost frustratingly clean-cut and straightforward sheen, I still have no idea how to approach his second album
Ocean Eyes. On one hand, this should be an easy one: the album does just about nothing right, from its embarrassingly gooey lyrics to its cornball string arrangements to, you guessed it, its ceaseless pinching from The Postal Service. Somehow, though, the album is an impenetrable beast: where do I start?
Ocean Eyes is such a banal and unchanging journey through fake emotions and contrived storylines that the album can't be taken apart, only examined as a whole. For starters, the album is an incessant barrage of infuriating over-sentimentality delivered in the form of simple, sunny electronic pop songs. The mushy nature of the songs wouldn't be such a problem if it wasn't such a blatant, shameless attempt at appealing to the mass of "indie" kids whose older brothers and sisters probably bought
Give Up, the album that
Ocean Eyes unmistakably pillages from. But let's not distract ourselves with the "influences": Ben Gibbard and Dntel's little indie-pop one-off project was, if a little insubstantial, charming, and you could do worse to "borrow" from them. No, instead, let's talk about the endless force-feeding down the listener's throat of the one song Owl City knows how to make. Listen to any song on
Ocean Eyes and you will get the same result: a gushy, blindly whimsical ditty, injected with maudlin string arrangements, skittering "baby's first IDM" electronic beats, and Adam Young's lyrics, not only nonsensical, but also pointlessly head-in-the-clouds, and strangely lifeless.
By roll of the dice, the mass audience has seemingly picked "Fireflies" as the best example of this, the song quickly rising to the number one spot on the Billboard Hot 100 and taking the place of "I Gotta Feeling" as the ringtone of countless tweens. The song, taken alone, may have a certain charm: its rippling synth line is a pleasant motif, and the chorus has a certain astral quality to it when it hits for the second time. Essentially, you have the feeling Adam Young reached his goal, however shabby that goal may be, on the song. And then there's the lyrics. To be honest, I'm sure you've heard them played over and over on the MacBooks of various teenage girls, but I'll give you a sampler anyway: "'Cause I'd get a thousand hugs, from ten thousand lightning bugs, as they tried to teach me how to dance. A foxtrot above my head, a sock hop beneath my bed, a disco ball is just hanging by a thread." Ouch. Throughout the song, Adam Young attempts a dangerous task: he takes on the challenge of taking lyrics that mean jack sh
it and singing them like they mean everything (a practice popularized by frontmen of mainstream alt bands such as Chris Martin of Coldplay). Needless to say, he fails miserably. The lyrics gain even more corniness when associated with his airy over-pronounciation of words (a la Ben Gibbard), turning the song into an unbearably embarrassing (not to mention unaffecting) trudge.
But it doesn't stop there: "Fireflies" seems like a minor offender next to "Dental Care", which veers into the territory of self-parody. Musically, the song is more of the same video-game title-screen absurdity that fills up the rest of the album. However, the lyrics set a new low for Adam Young. Witness as he claims that he'd "rather pick flowers instead of fights", and stand in awe as he throws out zingers like "I've been to the dentist a thousand times, so I know the drill", or "golf and alcohol don't mix, so that's why I don't drink and drive". Of course, therein lies the possibility that the song really
is self-parody, but even then it simply drifts into a self-satisfied musical representation of the most annoying smirk ever.
Although the most obvious failure of the album is the lyrical content, the music isn't much better. Every song is just about the same exact formula beaten to death, and, sometimes, the songs quite literally follow the same structure and chord progressions. "Hello Seattle", which includes a bubbling synth line strikingly similar to the one in "Fireflies", is replicated later in the album in "On the Wing", which sounds like a lazy remix of the track. Only "Cave In", the first track on the album, stands out at all, probably
because it's the first track on the album. It introduces an intriguing and charming aesthetic, which the rest of the album simply reciprocates to the point of overwhelming the listener.
At this point, fans of this kind of unsubstantial pop music will often remind me that Owl City and music like his isn't meant to be analyzed and simply to be enjoyed. And it's true, some pop music devoid of any deeper meaning is just meant to shallowly entertain. My problem with Young is that his music can't even do this: the songs are devoid of nearly any artistic merit and feel like the ultimate result of the "corporate music machine" many claim is ruining mainstream music these days. His music is lifeless of his own fault, and simply passes through the listener with every listen. Hell, his songs aren't even catchy enough to stay stuck in the head after the song finishes its duration. They do almost absolutely nothing while playing, have false emotions and sentimentality in place of real feelings, and are simply robotic, despite Young's best efforts to convince the listener that he's
just like them. To be fair, the lyrics ring true at one point in the album, during "Cave In", in which Young admits that his "backbone is paper-thin". You sure got that right, buddy.
