Theodicy is the branch of theology that attempts to offer up rationalizations for the Problem of Evil—that is, how a supposedly omnipotent, benevolent God could allow really, really bad shit to happen. There’s the idea that evil is a necessary result of free will, or that we perceive evil merely due to imperfect knowledge of God’s perfect plan, or that suffering tests us and that judgment will be meted out in an afterlife. Saint Augustine of Hippo, around the turn of the fifth century, proposed that natural disasters were caused by fallen angels and man’s evil by original sin. Earlier still, Saint Irenaeus basically suggested that suffering builds good character (he was like the dad from The Wonder Years of his day). Safe to say neither of these guys ever had to listen to Owl City.
Nor did they have to account for a world in which an abomination like the Owl City song “Fireflies” could go to number one on the Billboard charts. For the uninitiated: Owl City is the drippy, egregiously derivative synth-pop project of one Adam Young—picture the Postal Service if that act had been founded not as a side project for Death Cab for Cutie’s songwriter during a creative peak but instead by a preening, proselytizing prat from small-town Minnesota.
Young began recording music in his parent’s basement in 2007, releasing an EP of songs online. In early 2008, he was scouted and then signed by Universal Republic Records, which opted not to announce the signing so as to maintain Young’s image of independence while they began work on a marketing campaign. Owl City’s debut full-length, Maybe I’m Dreaming, was released independently in March of 2008, then officially rereleased by Universal in December of that year. Young didn’t start performing live until February of 2009. In July of 2009, Universal released Owl City’s second full-length, Ocean Eyes, via iTunes; a physical release followed in September. The next month, the now double-platinum-certified “Fireflies” went to number one on the Billboard singles chart, while Ocean Eyes reached number eight on the albums chart. The band comes to Seattle this week to a sold-out show at the Paramount.
For all its success, Ocean Eyes is an utterly execrable record. It begins, on “Cave In,” with the first of many couplets that make Young Money’s “Bed Rock” read like Leaves of Grass: “Please take a long hard look through your textbook/’Cause I’m history.” If you can make it past that hurdle (and the filtered guitar riff it rests on), you’ll find production polished to an obscene sheen, all bright fluttering synth chirps and gently skipping drum-machine beats, with Young’s Auto-Tuned vocals as cold and saccharine as a Diet Coke, every affected/effected breath stretched out for extra emotional emphasis.
“The Bird and the Worm” starts with an imbecilely jaunty acoustic-guitar strum—and a typically confused metaphor (the bird and the worm are having a romance?)—before adding toy piano and crunched hand claps, all building toward a chorus that’s as mindless as it is wordless.
Then there’s “Hello Seattle,” which originally appeared on 2007’s Of June EP, and which inexplicably became an early online hit for Owl City. In the song, Young, who has said he’d never been to Seattle at the time he wrote it, showers the city with yet more terribly mixed non sequitur metaphors (“Hello Seattle/I am a mountaineer/In the hills and highlands/I fall asleep in hospital parking lots/And awake in your mouth”)—not to mention nonnative species (“I am a manta ray… I’ll crawl the sandy bottom of Puget Sound/And construct a summer home”). This, over stuttering drums and soft-edged synth blips that sound stolen from a cell-phone commercial. Our city should be more ashamed of this tribute than Denton, Texas, deserves to be about that damning Mountain Goats song.
It’s not like Young’s musically inept, exactly. “Umbrella Beach,” for all its Euro-trash trance twinkle, has a fairly catchy chorus if you can manage to ignore the words and focus on the sweeping synthetic strings and propulsive beat. Despite its mushy, mind-numbing midtempo verse, “The Saltwater Room” (one of two songs here that also appeared on Dreaming) delivers a decent chorus, a duet between Young and a helium-pitched female foil. Singles “Hello Seattle” and “Fireflies” both contain terminally sticky melodies. It’s just that this stuff has all the soulfulness of data entry.
Oh, and that it’s totally insipid. On “Dental Care,” over another zippy melody and hand-clap motif, Young drops the following face-palmers: “I’ve been to the dentist a thousand times/So I know the drill,” “When hygienists leave on long vacations/That’s when dentists scream and lose their patients,” “Golf and alcohol don’t mix/And that’s why I don’t drink and drive.” Jesus, your teeth rot out just listening to this drivel.
“Meteor Shower” is another slow jam that culminates with another big, banal, pitch-corrected chorus—this time of the kind that sounds like it could be a declaration of love for a girl, but which is quite obviously about Jesus: “I can finally see/That you’re right there beside me/I am not my own/For I have been made new/Please don’t let me go/I desperately need you!” To call it thinly veiled would be an insult to veils. Not that Young has ever hidden his Christian zeal; on the contrary, he’s put it front and center on his MySpace page, posting, “I follow Jesus Christ wholeheartedly. He is my life, my strength, my all,” beneath a picture of fluffy white clouds in a deep blue sky—because, you know, Jesus lives on an actual cloud.
At this point, let’s just skip ahead a song to “Fireflies” and be done with this album. There’s more ringtone beeps and bloops, some chimes, a rounded bass synth line, a piano, some strings, all building up to a bombastic super-compressed chorus over which Young sighs out yet more naggingly catchy, glossy nonsense—worst of all the line “I’d get a thousand hugs/From ten thousand lightning bugs/As they tried to teach me how to dance.” Whether that’s a multiplied total of 10 million hugs (1,000 hugs from 10,000 bugs each) or if 9,000 bugs just miss out on the cuddling action isn’t exactly clear. Either way, it’s a lesser song than the Magnetic Fields’ “100,000 Fireflies” by an order of magnitude.
All of this is odious enough on its own, but then there’s the matter of Owl City being a wholly artless rip-off of the Postal Service, from the frippy electronics to Young’s damn near impersonation of Ben Gibbard’s voice. Young is often evasive in interviews, alternating between vague platitudes and precise nonsense, but he’s repeatedly denied drawing any influence from the Postal Service. In a September 2009 interview with the Onion‘s A.V. Club, he said he’d “never heard of the Postal Service”; a month later, he told Entertainment Weekly that he’d heard them “a little bit” and that “they are pretty similar,” but that he was always really more of a Death Cab fan. Death Cab musician/producer Chris Walla put it rather more bluntly on his Twitter: “Owl City should really consider buying Ben [Gibbard] a pony.” (He might want to sacrifice a goat to Savage Garden while he’s at it.)
Still, he’s all too happy to take the comparison, telling the New York Times, “[The Postal Service] released a record in 2003, and that was it. There was really nothing to compare it to until someone else came along and wrote the next chapter. Maybe that’s this record. Maybe that’s this band.”
So who’s buying this crap? It’s impossible to know exactly, but if my recollections from Christian summer camp are any indication, kids in cloistered religious communities are desperately eager for anything that looks and sounds like “cool” secular youth culture yet still makes it through parental approval. (Owl City might be drawn to Seattle as much for Mars Hill’s captive flock as by our bodies of water.) Then again, no one ever really went broke in America by catering to plain old bad taste, secular or otherwise. God help us. 
Man, talk about a theodicey proposition.
Man, talk about a theodicey situation.
Ah, one of Grandy’s two speeds: shamelessly fellating one of 4 bands or tearing an embarrassingly easy target apart to fill space. I feel bad that Owl City apparently screwed Grandy’s girlfriend.
Ah, one of Grandy’s two speeds: shamelessly fellating one of 4 bands or tearing an embarrassingly easy target apart to fill space. I feel bad that Owl City apparently screwed Grandy’s girlfriend.
#3 Seriously. That’s a whole lot of words to spend on something so obviously bad to 99% of the people that are going to read this. Good thing there’s nothing happening in local music to waste a feature on…
13 year old girls buy this crap.
Whatever, that little piece of shit deserves it. That quote from the NYT made me throw up in my mouth a little.
I’m pretty sure no one from a first world country that has watched television or a movie in the 7 years since that album was released can claim to not have heard the Postal Service.
Wow, since when did the Stranger cover music at Key Arena?
That falls firmly out of its “Neumo’s/ChopSuey/Crocodile” advertising base.
Weird.
The Magnetic Fields played ‘100,000 Fireflies’ when they were here in February. Stephin Merritt had a cold, and he still rocked.
*sigh*
There is a TON of music on pop radio that is more harmonically banal, just as pitch-corrected/overprocessed, and sporting “I love you, and you do too” lyrics. The lyrics may be trite here, but at least they aren’t degrading or offensive.
I believe the vitriol directed at Owl city is a result of 5 things:
1. He sounds a lot like Postal Service and Ben Gibbard, someone who is royalty in indie circles.
2. No one likes to hear their favorite music co-opted by Christian Rock (see, digs in article about this guys’ fondness for Jesus…as opposed to say, U2?)
3. He came from nowhere, so there’s general jealousy that he didn’t earn his success.
4. If you pitch correct anything that much, 50% of the population will think you a hack using a bandaid to cover lack of vocal talent.
5. Resentment that the Postal Service, after making one near perfect album, chose to give up and not continue. This record isn’t as good. Boo Hoo.
So, all that said, while I yearn for a real Postal Service album too with depth & intrigue, O.C.’s pretty catchy stuff and the kids like it. Get over it.
Thank You, Eric.
Allow me to also point out that I agree with Mr. Grandy’s opinion of Owl City. It’s complete shit.
Couple of points:
Nearly every single show on his current tour is sold out, including the KeyArena show.
Mainstream music fans are buying it. Let them have it.
Why waste space in an alternative weekly telling people something is shit, when your entire readership already knows it?
Ignore it and it will go away faster. When you shine a light on a turd it becomes an illuminated turd.
Jenkies, so we can assume that the author is not an Owl City fan?
Eric, you demonstrate pretty well why Evil exists:
Evil is people you don’t agree with.
Every time I get annoyed that something like this is happening, I go back and listen to Give Up instead.
You know, after reading this I went and checked the guy out, and GOD was it bad. I really wish I hadn’t, because now I have a headache from the vomitous vocals.
coudn’t agree more! top to bottom, this piece is dead-on.
as to who’s buying it, i can tell you: fourth-graders. they are lapping it up. i was up at my kids’ school in the gym a few weeks back and this came on and all the fourth grade girls peed their pants at once.
Why does everybody think he’s playing at the Key Arena? He’s playing at the Paramount.
Yeah, I cared so little about this tool that I got the venue wrong.
I will die in a fire now.
hey, grandy. way to make good use of space. dick.
iawts
Thanks Grandy. I couldn’t agree more. I saw this on the top of the iTunes chart so linked through and was aghast at how utterly lame it was. Since then I have asked everyone I know who likes music who this is and no one could say.
Then I asked my middle school aged son who was like, “Only girls like that. He sucks.”
So apparently he’s ridden a wave of middle school girl crushes…..
we dentonites are not embarrassed about darnielle’s song or our recent winter olympian. we are embarrassed about the jackass from this season’s episode of the bachelor.
Wanna see a real innovative and talented local band right here in Seattle? Go see Ocelot Omelet and then have your readers discuss that. I dare you! They are playing the Funhouse next Tuesday night the 6th.
I’m glad I’m not the only one appalled that Owl City exists and is successful. But what do you expect? It’s uncomplicated musical candy. God knows people love their sweets.
Man, I hope you eat this article with a fork and spoon when, 10 year from now, that philistine Christian kid you dissed becomes a hip 20 something and goes to an Owl City show saying “Yeah, this was my gateway band” while he has a Stereolab reunion tour ticket at will call for the next weekend. Fuck. You.
@23: “He’s ridden a wave of middle school girl crushes…”
Who do you think actually BUYS music these days?
Owl City is shit. But half of music has been shit. Forever. If a music journalist wants to tear into something, let them. They’re critics. That’s what they do. If you’re ambivalent about something as a music critic, you’re not doing it right.
To the author:
Maybe the record does get a little preachy…knowing Young’s background, this isn’t surprising, and it would be easy to read religion into these lyrics if you know that… however, the lyrics are… ambiguous at best, you can take them to mean just about whatever you want them to mean.
as for the music… this is electronica style.. honestly, WTF do you expect besides “chirpy ring-tone sounds” and rampant, wanton use of Auto-Tune?
lighten up… for Christ’s sake.
Cleanse thyselves by listening to “Seattle”, the song by Bobby Sherman from 1969(?). The Game Theory cover is great too. Perfect ipecac for “Hello Seattle”
Note to above: Eric wrote this because Owl City is in town, hence local
PS: so all the Eric trolls are Mars Hill members in disguise? Woah!
Riiiight, SO. Who SHOULD we all go see live?
Seriously. I want my five minutes back. I never heard of Owl City and never would have seen the show. I came here to read about who I should I go see.
So? Who?
Owl City is super-nifty, and their music is totes dreamy!!! I wish I could get hugs from lightning bugs! Golly gee, it sure is too bad Stranger people don’t like them. Gum drops and kisses!! Laters…
@31: Perhaps you’ll find this helpful.
Why not a feature on Pierced Arrows?
That band is vastly more important than Owl City and far more relevant to local music.
People in the mid-90s thought, “Rap can’t get any dumber than this. Gangsta rap is the lowest it can go.” And then of course today we have stuff like the Young Money crew, and we look back at Tupac and Biggie and think, “wow, they had amazing talent compared to these clowns.” I think the same thing might be happening with indie rock — it’s becoming children’s music. Just like Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” caused a riot in 1913, you jump ahead to 1940 and it’s being used in “Fantasia.” You don’t need to do an extensive market analysis to figure out that the average Owl City fan is a 12 or 13 year old girl. I think what’s painful for indie rock fans is seeing this music that’s clearly rooted in their world become something for tweens graduating from Jonas Brothers and Justin Bieber.
this piece, and a lot of these comments just proves what a bunch of idiotic indie hipster music snobs this city is filled with. people who think that by tearing apart something “popular” they are somehow more “real”, have better taste in music (when really they are listening to the same music as 90% of this and every west coast city), and are more sophisticated than the general population. get over yourself, and stop killing your future babies by strangling your ball-sack in your skinny jeans.
I remember driving to my mom’s house in BFE, Kansas last Christmas Eve through a blinding snowstorm. I skidded into a ditch about a mile from her house when that barf-inducing song came on the radio. Without any phone signal to speak of, I remember thinking, “Holy sh*t. This may just be one of the last songs I ever hear.” I think God felt guilty about that, granted me a brief window of phone signal, and I was able to phone my dad to tow me out. I am nonetheless resentful of the almighty for allowing this song to be made. Meanwhile, Alex Chilton remains dead.
The problem with you indie hipster jokesters is that you are obsessed with being “right” on what can only be described as matters of opinion. OK, you don’t like Owl City – good, don’t listen to it. Meantime, the rest of us ARE enjoying the synth-poppy goodness. You’d probably be happier people if you took a deep breath and let other people have their fun now and again.
eat a dick grandy
He’s a josh bradford rip off. And really, that’s not saying much. Normal boys get a barely emo cut, sing some songs and love god… sick!!! Hail satan
funny, i was in a Berlin train station yesterday and this song came on over the PA. this article helped make me feel a little less embarrassed to be an American.
Hey comment #36, “stop killing future babies by strangling your ball sac in skinny jeans”… that’s the kind of GOD thinking we’re trying to run out ov this world! Your just pissed cuz no hot skinny jean wearin hipster boi wants to fuck you! Oh wait, you want babies. Hahaha!!!
Portlanders got the same story from mercury. We’re lucky. No one really cares. While owlcity is playing, we’ll all be with muse and silversun pickups!!!
“I really like you a lot”. I am a fan of pop music. I mainly went with my best girl friend for her birthday. I cruised christian boys, man are they hot.
Haha, the last paragraph made this review. My super-sheltered super-christian teenage nieces LUV owl city.
*sigh*… So, because of how bad he made it sound, I just had to listen to it of course, and like @16, I wish I hadn’t. But then I knew to expect that.
So yeah, between the “I’d get a thousand hugs/ From ten thousand lightning bugs” line to the fact that he looks like he was created in the Disney Labs from the DNA combination of a Jonas brother and Aaron Eckhart, and that he’s apparently trying to be both indy rocker and Christian rocker (because we always need more douches like Creed, right?), I can see why he’s so reviled.
And as someone who grew up in a “christian household” where anything more edgy than Audio Adrenaline was destroyed, I can agree with Grandy’s assumption that the christian kids alone will help propel this moron’s career forward, at least for the foreseeable future.
Owl City is as Reggie Watts would say a “fuck shit stack.” God loves you Eric Grandy for calling out this syrupy hack for what he is.
I love this review forever.
I moved to Seattle recently from Montana to get away from closed minded assholes giving me the ‘what’s cool and not cool’ speech… Upon reading your article about Owl City, and another writers less than stellar comments about Muse, I have decided one thing: Seattle’s music scene and publications are run by the asshole elite. If a band has mass popularity and aren’t Radiohead then they are shit? I don’t like Owl City as much as anyone else but I sure as fuck didn’t waste my time writing an article about it. But i did feel my time was worth writing this: Hipsters and ‘indie’ music fans can keep their “i’m right because I listen to what’s cool” attitude. Apparently im not in the echelon of jerk-offs who get off by letting other people know why THEIR music is so much worse than (Radiohead, The Postal Service, Sonic Youth,…any other band that is hip to like because they are ‘REAL’ music)
-nick
The “James Taylor Is Marked For Death” of our times. Bravo!
There’s better bands to hate than Owl City.
How was the show, btw?
it really is too bad that i go to a school where the Owl City “culture” has permeated the souls of the majority of the student body. And when i’m listening to the Postal Service, they ask “hey! is that the new Owl City song???”
I just heard a new Owl City song on the radio today, and I think they’re getting worse. There was no bottom end, the vocalist is a wimp, and the lyrics! “I am thinking it’s a sign that the freckles in your eyes are mirror images, and when we kiss they’re perfectly aligned.” Talk about high-fructose.
Spot on article. Great job, Eric.
(I looked up that Fireflies video last week not knowing I would waste 2 minutes of my life. God awful.)
Excellent review.
And who knew there were so many 14-year-old girls who post on The Stranger’s boards?
Owl City reminds me of the song “steal my sunshine ” be Len which my daughters listened to in grade school (briefly) Brutal stuff!
@56, I thought “Steal my Sunshine” was adorable (forgive me, I was in grade school when it came out)! At least they weren’t trying to be deep, unlike this talentless hack. Ew!
This article is absolutely not a waste of space because it amused and entertained ME. If people are making that song such a huge deal…the reviewer has a right to break it down to the same extreme on the other end.
First time I heard this song I was kind of half listening skeptically until the lightning bugs hugs line.
“Ohhhhh noooooooo.”
Eric-
I am in no way condoning the “music” of Owl City, but NeverShoutNever is even more grating and even more sticky (and shtick-y) and even more deserving of some Grandyisms.
“everything you do/is super duper cute/and I can’t stand it” being an example of their poetic, sweeping lyricism
thank you. thank you so much.
Before reading this I thought, for some reason, I was the only person who couldn’t stand this crappy music. So, yeah, this article served a purpose. I now know I’m not the only person who pukes a little every time one of these horrible, horrible songs is played.
I’m curious, what standard do you use to define “evil”?
Was the actions of Adolf Hitler “evil” because it was not in accord with the majority outside of his culture and society?
Or was it evil because there is an universal transcendental objective standard for good and evil?
If the majority of a society are in disagreement with “X” does that make “X” evil?
And what rights does one country have to impose its cultural standard of good and evil on another?
Maybe genocide is wrong for Americans, but not for Germans.
The so called “problem of evil” isn’t “Why does God allow evil to exist?” but rather, apart from God and His revealed Will how can we epistemologically be sure that anything is good or evil and not merely a matter of personal or societal preference of one act over another?
OK. Before he was signed, I was friends with him. He’s a sweet guy. Its ok to believe his music is God-awful, but as a person, he’s great.
BOWEL CITY TOOK A DUMP, AND SMOKED METH WITH PHALLICE IN CHAINS.
SEATTLE HIPHOP4 LYFE.
STAY HI BROS
Besides regurgitating his other annoying band into half of Postal Service, Ben Gibbard ganks the other half of PS from Aphex Twin. So they both suck hairy balls because I declare Aphex is more real than your mainstream “indie” crap. And I have the authority because I listen to more obscure music than you do.
Go suck a fuck, Grandy.
I think this guy is a complete turd as well – however, @50 – comparing this fuckwad Grandy to Lester is possibly the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. And that includes this piece of shit “article”.
FUCK Eric Grandy. I didn’t listen to this album because this article gave the expectation that it would be garbage. Turns out it’s pretty fucking GREAT–slightly brilliant, even, on a couple tracks. And not even in an ironic hipster piece of shit kind of way; like, really genuinely good.
“Maybe that’s this band.”
Give me a break. One man is not a band. I don’t care what the fuck he wants to call himself. Go ahead, let him change his goddamn real name to Owl City if that’s his poison, but that doesn’t mean he’s suddenly any more a band just because he picked a name. But you know, honestly, it makes perfect sense coming from him that he considers himself a band. Aww, isn’t that cute. Junior thinks he can play because he has autotune and a drum machine!