Love Love Shine

Review: Owl City – 'All Things Bright and Beautiful'

The answer is difficult to explain, for the album serves up much the same formula as its predecessor whilst making occasional stabs at breaking new ground. Young, who created and sold his first two albums independently off the back of viral MySpace promotion before signing to Universal, has produced a record that should satisfy his predominantly youthful following, while continuing to alienate more mature listeners.

To begin to explain, Young’s lyrical style, which some find touching, earnest, tender and insightful in its own charming, guileless way, can equally be described as faux-abstract, pretentious, frivolous, without substance, purulent. Where some thought ‘Fireflies’ contained notable imagery (‘ten million fireflies lit up the world as I feel asleep’), others felt sickened by its relentlessly banal refrains (‘I’d like to make myself believe that planet Earth turns slowly’).

And so no one can envy Young – for all his recent successes a relative novice in the music business, not yet twenty five years old – as he undertakes this follow up, and he involves some friends to help him along; rapper Shawn Chrystopher features on lead single ‘ Alligator Sky ’, a laid-back synth ditty that unfurls like a flowing musical caftan, Young’s usually sub-poetic disposition manifesting itself immediately with the line ‘I saw the autumn leaves peel up off the street, take wing on the balmy breeze and sweep you off your feet’. It is as-expected, the type of song that could quite easily accompany a lazy Sunday shop through Ikea.