Why did the owl 'owl? (Maybe I'm Dreaming - Owl City)

Member Name: davidbuttery

Product:	Maybe I'm Dreaming - Owl City
Date:	08/11/09 (56 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A couple of catchy numbers, cheerful and inoffensive pop

Disadvantages: Very little depth, becomes repetitive in more than small doses, expensive

Electronic/synthpop outfit Owl City is not really a band as such, as it has only one member: Adam Young. The name comes from his home town, Owatonna in Minnesota. Young is one of those rare musicians who lived the internet dream: he he recorded his music in a basement, published it on MySpace and after this and a couple of independently released albums was picked up by a major label (Universal Republic) and had his song "Fireflies" reach number one in the US charts thanks to almost two-thirds of a million downloads via iTunes.

Maybe I'm Dreaming is the second of the aforementioned independent albums, released at the end of 2008. It's not particularly long, at only 12 tracks and a shade under 48 minutes, but there's enough here to see what Owl City is all about: a strongly electronic-sounding very "artificial" sound that may prove off-putting to some but which can be seen as giving the songs a slightly retro feel. You could almost imagine some of this music being used as demo songs on Casio keyboards from two decades ago, or even on a classic Amiga computer. It's vaguely reminiscent of The Postal Service's sound; their song Such Great Heights is perhaps an example of what a more accomplished Owl City might sound like.

Right; before we go any further, let's get the Auto-Tune bit out of the way. Auto-Tune is an audio processing application that corrects slight mistakes in pitch, thus allowing pitch-perfect recordings even when singers themselves are a little bit off the mark. It's controversial, some people feeling that it removes the humanity from a performance and creates a monotonously homogeneous sound. I have a lot of sympathy for this point of view, and don't generally like Auto-Tuned performances, but in Owl City's case (assuming it's used here - most bands don't make the fact public, so one has to guess) it seems to work better than expected with Young's reedy voice.

One thing Maybe I'm Dreaming is not is introspective and gloomy: this is light, insubstantial synthpop. The lyrics are not worth spending too much time worrying about, as none of them seem particularly deep or cryptic: "Wake up like an early birdie / We'll get a head start on the day" from (surprise, surprise) Early Birdie is pretty typical. There are parallels here to the Lightning Seeds, but the British group's observations on everyday life do seem sharper, and their occasional forays into seedier areas are missing: either they're beyond Young or, quite possibly, they simply don't interest him.

There's a strong theme of flying throughout the album: four of the 12 songs have related words in their titles, and the lyrics of several others spend time on the subject. Whether or not this, with the record's title, is a deliberate reference to the fact that one of the most frequently-occurring dreams is that of flying is unclear. If not, then there's little the other songs have in common other than their sound. Young does seem happy to stay in his comfort zone the whole way through, and there's nowhere on the album where you will be brought up short by an unexpected twist. This is not an album to buy if you want to be challenged in your listening.

Two tracks stood out for me: the first is The Technicolor Phase, with its fairy-dust instrumental interludes, surprisingly catchy synth-driven melody with a simple but effective drum track and lyrics playing nicely on the colours of the rainbow - though trying to get "orange" into one syllable was ill advised, and the same applies with "starfish". The other song that stuck in my memory was the final track, West Coast Friendship, a slightly faster song which despite maintaining the album's silly lyrics ("And we can sleep where we reside with redwoods around us") manages to capture something of the sense of exhilaration of the singer's trip to California to be with the one he loves.

Unfortunately the rest of Maybe I'm Dreaming is largely forgettable. It's inoffensive and undemanding, which can be welcome if you're in the mood for it, but you can often feel the music passing in one ear and out of the other even as you listen. The samey nature of the Owl City sound does begin to grate after a few tracks, and it's best listened to in small doses of just one or two songs at a time; the full twelve is certainly too many unless you're a huge fan of Young's voice. Overall, nothing particularly memorable, if not completely devoid of interest.

Track listing:

1. On The Wing
2. Rainbow Veins
3. Super Honeymoon
4. The Saltwater Room
5. Early Birdie
6. Air Traffic
7. The Technicolor Phase
8. Sky Diver
9. Dear Vienna
10. I'll Meet You There
11. This Is The Future
12. West Coast Friendship

The album is available, as of the time of writing, for £13.19 on Amazon, but is much too expensive at that price. Better value are the individual track downloads (also from Amazon) which cost 79p each, so that the entire album would come in at £9.48, though I wouldn't recommending all 12 songs. You can also listen free - though with adverts - via Spotify.

(The answer to the question in the review title is, of course, "Because the woodpecker would peck 'er.")

Summary: Flashes of promise, but nothing out of the ordinary