Owl City provides an easy listen, but what else?

Adam Young provides a generic Postal Service sound for people who can't get enough synthpop.

The first time I heard Owl City’s newish hit “Fireflies” I assumed that I was listening to a Postal Service flop that never really made it to the surface of the pop world.

I asked my roommate what we were listening to and to my surprise he told me that it was a group called Owl City. I had never heard of them before, so I looked them up and found out that “they” (the group is really only one guy named Adam Young, who has a band to back him up) had released 3 albums, the most recent being Ocean Eyes in September of 2009.

I found the album on MySpace, gave it a listen and I was less than astonished. Most of the songs sound the same and the lyrics are cheesy. In the hit song “Fireflies,” Young has a line that goes “I get a thousand hugs, from ten thousand lightning bugs.” Come on!

I did some reading and found that Owl City actually has a sizable following and based on my impression of Ocean Eyes, I couldn’t figure out why people were so pumped about them. I saw an interview with Adam Young and the writer asked him if he was looking forward to another album from The Postal Service–the last one came out in 2003–and he answered, “Since no one has done anything quite like it, it’s almost like everyone is naturally saying this is the next step — maybe that’s me, maybe that’s this record [Ocean Eyes].” Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything that wasn’t already done by The Postal Service and there wasn’t anything borrowed that seemed to be any sort of an improvement either.

After listening to the album I asked a bunch of people why they liked Owl City and without exception, people’s answers included something along the lines of, “it’s like ear candy.” Ear candy is fine with me as long as it is not the Great Value brand from Walmart. You know that stuff that is almost the same as the real thing but not quite? There is other ear candy that I love listening to. For example, I would compare The Postal Service to a box of Jelly Belly, jellybeans. It’s not a steak dinner, but it tastes really good and who says that Ben Gibbard is trying to cook steak anyway? Owl City on the other hand could be compared to fake Jelly Beans. They are kind of like the real ones but they hurt your teeth and the banana flavored one tastes nothing like a banana.

In other words, the entire album sounds like a rip-off of The Postal Service. Young’s and Gibbard’s voices, the drum beats and the melodies all sound extremely similar. It sounds like it could be Ben Gibbard trying to get through some writer’s block.

I am not saying that this is terrible music. It’s catchy and creative and to be honest, I don’t mind listening to it once in a while. But it’s repetitive, formulaic and it seems like it this style was exhausted 6 years ago.