Owl City
Mobile Orchestra
Reviewed by: Max Miller
If you’re like me, there are probably a lot of things you don’t know about Owl City. Like how Owl City is not a band, but rather one guy named Adam Young. Or how that guy wasn’t 16 years old when he released Owl City’s massive single “Fireflies” in 2009, even though he sounded like it, and even though everyone listening to it seemingly was (granted, I was in high school at the time). Most people still listening to Owl City these days might be even younger, actually, given that Young has written original songs for several animated films like Wreck-It Ralph, Legend of the Guardians and Smurfs 2. In checking out the “Fireflies” video for the first time, in which Young performs the song while sitting at a synthesizer in a bedroom full of dancing toys, I can’t help but wonder whether this whole Owl City thing really has been aimed at children and young adolescents the whole time. This is an important distinction to make when reviewing Mobile Orchestra, Young’s fifth album under this moniker, considering one of its lead singles features Hanson.
Hanson, of course, are best known for their hit single “MMMBop,” another song that was popular with my peer group at the time of its release (I was five). I suppose Hanson don’t technically qualify as children’s music either, seeing as the only people who dislike “MMMBop” are people with big hunks of granite where their hearts once were, but they certainly have reached a level most pop artists dream of — the point at which their music becomes ubiquitous even to people who don’t particularly pay attention to popular music (a category under which children definitely fall). But anyways, what happens when these two titans of music-you-don’t-even-have-to-pay-attention-to-it’s-just-there clash?
A bunch of references to what the Hansons and Young did as kids. Seriously. It’s literally a list of nostalgic references to Juicy Juice and Jurassic Park. The song is inoffensively catchy enough, but “Unbelievable” does nothing to dissuade me from this notion that Owl City is actually meant to be exclusively for children and has somehow crossed over anyways.
The rest of the album is all paint-by-numbers EDM-lite, featuring plenty of high-drama hooks and blandly optimistic lyrics. Opener “Verge” features vocals from Aloe Blacc, the singer from Avicii’s inescapable “Wake Me Up,” which seems to herald Owl City’s intentions of placidly taking whatever leftovers Young can get from the current pop boom (despite having been arguably one of the foundations of its current prominence). Oh, and then there are “My Everything” and “You’re Not Alone,” which are blatantly Christian, since apparently Owl City has been a Christian act (a CEDM act, in fact — there’s a Wikipedia page!) this whole time and I never even noticed, despite the fact that Young writes half his hits with the dude from Relient K. I don’t even have time to unpack all the implications behind that.
And yet nothing here could possibly disappoint a dyed-in-the-wool Owl City fan. I’m just beginning to suspect the only person who falls under that category is a middle-class white child between the ages of 5 and 11. And maybe his or her well-meaning parents. And maybe their minister.
Rating: Semi-obnoxious
