Owl City Ocean Eyes (Island)
2/5
By: Tom Hocknell
Ocean Eyes has seemingly come from nowhere, and is so eager to please you want to push it away after the first song before it slobbers on your trousers. If it were in school, it would be facing constant detention for disrupting the class and having no attention span. In fact most people with attention spans are going to be irritated by this album in places, if not throughout.
This is actually the third album from the elegantly titled Owl City, who are effectively the lone American Adam Young. With his recent UK number 1 single, ‘Fireflies’, a song that has a better version trying to break the surface, he has become suddenly as ubiquitous as the iPhone. However, unlike the phones, his use of technology is less even, less well applied. It’s not to say he is not talented, if anything there are too many ideas. Like a group brainstorm on Red Bull™, it is all too busy, and would benefit from some space.
When it does slow down, such as on the gentle ‘Saltwater Room’, and in the curling electronics of opener ‘Cave In’, there’s great promise. However, a tendency for cheap, toy-town rave stabs, such as on the exhausting ‘Umbrella Beach’, slings the album back to 1997, and not in a good way.
It is a shame, as there are great moments in even the weakest songs - - which beneath the glistening production have more than meets the eyes -- but are too frequently simply searching for a tune amidst the hooks.
Perhaps the problem is the lack of roots: it’s hard to see where he’s coming from, other than Minnesota. It is clearly influenced by the generic 80s pop single and 90s euro-pop, by those one hit wonders no one ever admitted to buying; it is certainly not the same 80s that fuels the soon-to-be massive Hurts. Songs such as ‘Bird and the Worm’ begin with one intention, only to end with another, like a guest in fancy dress forgetting who they are. The oldest criticism of electronic music is that it has no heart, and unfortunately, for the first time in a while, it is valid here.
Artists in this article: Owl City
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