Concert Review: Owl City
By Teresa Jue
April 11, 2010 9:36 p.m.
There was a G-rated air looming around Club Nokia on Friday night as Owl City took the stage. The floor was packed with tweens, teens and respective chaperones as Owl City front man Adam Young undulated across the stage, flailing emotively with his guitar as he sang of glowing insects and congenial hand-holding.
This is the exact brand of chaste electro-pop music that has sold out across the country. Owl City is the brainchild of Minnesotan Adam Young, who began concocting tunes in 2007 on a laptop in his parents’ basement during bouts of insomnia.
Bursting into the mainstream through MySpace, Owl City topped the charts with the hit “Fireflies” and reached platinum with the 2009 album “Ocean Eyes.” Despite the suspicious similarity Young’s sound has to another electro-pop band, The Postal Service, Owl City continues to accrue popularity among youths and their moms.
That said, I came into this concert armed with an arsenic-laced notion that anything so family-friendly couldn’t possibly be any good. However, I was surprised to find the whole show rather pleasant.
The opening act, Nashville-based band Paper Route, played jams tinged with a mixture of punk and electro, a respite from the keyboard extravaganza that would ensue. Following the band was Canadian-based pop singer, LIGHTS, who can be described as a more edgy version of one of those Disney starlets, what with her cutesy keytar tunes that belied her tattooed arms and deeply parted hair.
The opening acts were an appropriate crescendo into Owl City’s set, as a much-appreciated violinist and a cellist appeared onstage and Young finally gallivanted from the drums to the mic with the song “Umbrella Beach” as the lighting cast a pall of pink flowers throughout the venue.
“I like you,” Young said repeatedly throughout the night, with a naive awkwardness that begged for reciprocity. However, it was this exact naivete that evoked a swooning portrait of the singer, accented by his bouncy gesticulations across the stage and the floppiness of his aggressively side-swept bangs.
The performance of “Dental Care” had Young chucking a toothbrush fresh from his mouth into the crowd, his own squeaky-clean version of the sweaty towel and guitar pick.
This is the innocuous nature of Young that is reflected in the hit “Fireflies,” a song about “10 million fireflies” that is quite saccharine. The song “Vanilla Twilight” added a thin layer of syrup to the mix, with lyrics like “Cause the spaces between my fingers / Are right where yours fit perfectly.”
Like perfectly fitted hands, the conclusion of the show was appropriate, as Young closed the show with an encore of “Hello Seattle,” a lullaby of sorts that is ironic for the lead-singer insomniac.
Admittedly, Owl City’s keyboard medleys were catchy ““ I found myself nodding my head in tune more than once throughout the show, and I let out a faint “Aw!” to that line about the hand-holding.
The childlike inflection of Young’s vocals was fitting but were sometimes cloistered by the confluence of synthesized instruments. The ultimate problem though, was that many of Owl City’s songs are rather repetitive, making for similar rhythms and instrumental qualities that were at times indistinguishable from each other.
While I witnessed more severely side-swept bangs than I could normally handle, it has to be said that Young knows how to fulfill that niche of sugary, nature-inspired medleys that has garnered quite a substantial fan base. However, it is that sickly sweetness that Owl City amps up in large, repetitive dosages, which, more often than not, could be minimized.
““ Teresa Jue
E-mail Jue at [email protected].
