You guessed it; I’m branching out.
(Finally.)
I normally try to stay away from
reviewing music. (Yeah, I know, the title implies I will, so here’s my first
spin at it. Shut up.) However, this one came out, and I knew that one day—one day—I
would get my icy little hands around its throat and squeeze the life out of it.
How I’ve longed for this.
 |
| Sadly, the reverie of the cover does NOT deliver. |
And I will savor every moment.
Up next: Owl City’s The Midsummer Station.
I’ll admit it. When I heard this was
coming out a mere year after All Things
Bright and Beautiful, I nearly floated into the “Ponderosa canopy” on “sugar-maple
wings” and lived in expectant ecstasy until I could buy it. Then Owl City put
out Shooting Star – EP to give us a
taste of what was to come. That’s when my hesitation began.
I had previously read an article
that Adam Young—Owl City, by name—was collaborating with other writers in Station to put forth “new sounds.” While
I dig artists in any field stretching their sugar-maple wings and trying out
new stuff, I didn’t really know what to expect from this one. So when I started
listening to Shooting Star I could
automatically sense the difference in Young’s style. You know why? It wasn’t
his.
Or, at least, not totally.
My previous love of Owl City came
from Young’s imagination taking over and painting such vivid pictures you could
taste very color on the canvas (yes; TASTE the COLORS). His view of everything
being possible rang true with me. He held coal, squeezed a fist, and brought
forth a diamond.
Now he’s bringing forth crap.
Big—heaping—piles.
To begin, The Midsummer Station is . . . bland. Say you wake up in the
morning after a great night with friends and family and you sit down to
breakfast. Your favorite person in the world is serving you the morning meal
that you’ve been smelling the entire time you’ve laid in bed. The platter sits
beyond your reach under a fancy silver dome, and you wait and wait and wait.
And when all the smells in the kitchen, all the aromas of deliciousness, all
the signs of cooking, all the delectability of this labor of love is given to
you in hints of what’s coming, the dome is finally pulled up, and instead of something along the lines of this:
 |
| Mmmmmmmmmmm..... |
You get this:
 |
| I would like to NOT venture a guess as to what is next to the toast... |
Yep. Shooting Star was promising. Station
died.
Not only are the songs completely
nondescript, they reach beyond the area of pop and fall into a vat so cheesy,
so fluffy, so full of hot air that you just want to die. And not because Adam Young sucks. Far from it! Because he’s SO
MUCH BETTER than what these people wanted him to write. (Which, in essence, is
corn-poop.) And he went along with it. (Shame on you, Adam Young.)
The first track, “Dreams and
Disasters” pretty much sets the tone for the entire album: blah, yawn,
repetitive, okay, average. Nothing spectacular, nothing imaginative, nothing
crazy-vivid. I cannot taste the colors, Adam Young. Where are the colors???
WHERE?
The following tracks are “Dreams and
Disasters” with different lyrics and a bit of a varied sound, but remain the
same in content:
-
Shooting Star (2)
-
Gold (3)
-
Dementia (4)
-
I’m Coming After
You (5)
-
Speed of Love
(6)
-
Good Time (7)
-
Embers (8)
-
Bombshell Blonde
(13, I think this is an iTunes bonus track)
That being said, let me move on to my REALLY BIG
problems with Station, track by
abominable track.
The first abomination would be “I’m Coming After You.”
Let it be noted that this song sounds like a stalker going after his or her
target. Let it be dually noted that when
played at half-speed, this stalker sounds like a 55-year-old pedophile in a car
chasing his underage victim. Instead
of imagining an underwater Ferris wheel that is part of an underwater city just
off “Umbrella Beach,” or a space station ready to launch its new
mission-centered crafts into the “Galaxies,” this is what I see:
Point taken?
 |
| "Bad Time," by Owl City, Featuring Tommy Pickles! |
Next, the track I completely deleted
out of my iTunes: “Good Time.” (I can’t even stand myself for writing its
name.) This song, besides being inherently out of place on an Owl City album
(and being inherently STUPID), fills the mind with nonsense and is so mind-numbingly fluffy, I thought I’d fallen into a melted puddle left by a ghost-busted
Stay-Puft Man. Not only THAT, but this song
is SO REPETITIVE, it’s like having a record skipping in your head
FOREVER-EVER-EVER-EVER-EVER-EVER-EVER-EVER-EVER-EVER-EVER-EVER. And also, Tommy
Pickles stars as the guest artist. (Oh, wait, that’s Carly Rae Jepsen? Huh. Doesn’t
really make a difference in sound, now, does it?)
 |
| Disgusting... |
Never before has Adam Young strayed
into such territory as this. I would expect something like this song from, say, Katy Perry, One Direction, Taylor Swift, Carly Rae
Jepsen (you know, bands without brains or talent) . . . but not the masterful artist that Young grew into when he peaked
at All Things Bright and Beautiful. Ear-garbage
of such magnitude really does not please this Owlette. For example, compare the
innocent comedy of “Deer in the Headlights” to the really rather risqué lyrics
of “Bombshell Blonde.”
“Met
a girl in the parking lot/and all I did was say hello/her pepper spray made it
rather hard/for me to walk her home/but I guess that’s the way it goes/Tell me
again was it love at first sight?/when I walked by and you caught my eye/didn’t
you know love could shine this bright/well smile because you’re the deer in the
headlights”
(“Deer
in the Headlights,” All Things Bright and
Beautiful)
“That
blonde, she’s a bomb, she’s an atom bomb/rigged up and ready to drop!/Bad news,
I’m a fuse and I’ve met my match/so stand back she’s about to go off/That
vixen, she’s a master of disguise/I see danger when I look in her eyes/she’s so
foxy . . ./Her love is a drug laced with ecstasy . . ./A hot mess in a dress
gets the best of me/She’s ice cold but she’s making me melt”
(“Bombshell
Blonde,” The Midsummer Station)
So! Had enough yet?
The only crumbs that save this album
are “Silhouette,” which brings us back to the stuff that Adam Young USED to
serenade us with, “Metropolis,” which makes me think of a storyline I’ve got in
the works, and “Take It All Away,” which reminds me I was born in the 90s, the
era of the boy band. These three tracks are executed nicely, but everything
else? This:
Instead of this:
Gee, you would have thought that the
MAJOR SUCCESS of Ocean Eyes and the
severely, critically, massively acclaimed success of All Things Bright and Beautiful would have tipped Adam Young off
that he was doing something right. I guess NOT.
The
Midsummer Station gets 1.5 sour notes out of 5. (The .5 comes from the
crumbs.)
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