Owl City – Ocean Eyes – Album Review

I have usually heard of an artist before they blow up super-huge. I can only think of two artists that were mega huge that I’d never heard of in “medium exposure” mode (at least here in the US market): Evanescence and most recently Owl City. I had a friend say, “Man, I’m obsessed with that stupid fireflies song”, to which I replied “Huh? Fireflies? You mean Fireflight?”. He then educated me about this new guy named Owl City, who much like Falling Up’s Jesse Ribordy recorded a solo synthy type album. Surely enough, I listened to fireflies and saw the video of fireflies (below) and was hooked. I recently had the opportunity to purchase the album, and it is musically freaking awesome for it’s genre. To me it is remeniscient of a musical mash-up of Falling Up, Relient K, Imogen Heap, and with the upbeat happiness of a Rocket Summer.

I previewed the album on iTunes (which BTW is a new feature that I LOVE that they either licensed or stole from eMusic) and I was fairly impressed. On the first listening I was more than a little intrigued by the album itself, because it is quite honestly a wonderful soundscape, and I love this album. What intrigued me most about it is that a few albums here and there I look up albums because I don’t understand what a single song or two are talking about. Some albums like ‘Fangs’ from Falling Up are excellent but make absolutely no sense until you piece it together. This album makes sense on first listen, but only a bit. Delving deeper, the lyrics are quite biting and revealing.

So, as I’m listening to this album, I came across track 7, which is called “Meteor Shower”, a mellow ballad that swells in the middle with the lyrics:

“I am not my own;
For I have been made new;
Please don’t let me go;
I desperately need you.”

I was intrigued, these are not spiritually agnostic lyrics IMHO, so I started to look deeply into the lyics and I found that there are a few love songs, but nothing Raunchy. Overall, I really LOVE this album. Even my father-in-law (who usually doesn’t mind but definitely doesn’t like a ton of my music) loved it. I look forward to picking up some of this guy’s older stuff and seeing if it’s all the same quality (and I hope it is). If you want a fun and happy album GO GET THIS ONE!!!