Owl City - Page 6

Owl City Readying Side Project Sky Sailing (Which Sounds Just Like Owl City)

Robbie Daw | May 5, 2010 3:24 pm
Robbie Daw | May 5, 2010 3:24 pm

Owl City Wants You To Look Up At The “Vanilla Twilight” And Do Little Else

Becky Bain | March 24, 2010 10:52 am
Becky Bain | March 24, 2010 10:52 am

Cheryl Cole’s Cover Of “Fireflies” Is Like Raid To The Ears

Robbie Daw | March 23, 2010 9:01 am
Robbie Daw | March 23, 2010 9:01 am


Owl City Bugs Out Again With “Butterfly Wings”

Robbie Daw | January 27, 2010 8:42 am
Robbie Daw | January 27, 2010 8:42 am

Ke$ha Sheds Some Light On ‘Fireflies’ By Pranking Owl City

Robbie Daw | December 16, 2009 8:02 am
Robbie Daw | December 16, 2009 8:02 am

keshaocDr. Luke protege and upcoming Lilith Fair performer Ke$ha has been steadily continuing her wave of raunchy pop terror, and even amped it up a bit at a House Of Blues gig in Houston on Monday, where the 22-year-old singer shared a bill with Adam Young (aka Owl City).

As Young was in the middle of performing his ever present mega-hit “Fireflies,” Ke$ha and two of her band mates hopped on stage—decked out as, uh, fireflies—and proceeded to jiggle around behind him. That’s certainly one way to jazz up a song that even Owl City fans have probably had their fill of.

Was Adam in on the joke? It doesn’t look like it. He seemed amused, nonetheless. Catch Ke$ha pranking Owl City below. More »


Owl City Back At #1

Robbie Daw | November 12, 2009 7:27 pm
Robbie Daw | November 12, 2009 7:27 pm

owl-city

Reluctant pop star Adam Young—aka one-man band Owl City—is back at #1 for a second non-consecutive week on the Billboard Hot 100 chart with “Fireflies.” We’re using “reluctant” here because it’s somewhat hard to track down a press shot of this guy where he’s not shoe-gazing or doesn’t have beams of sunlight obscuring his face.

Not that we’re happy to see “Whatcha Say” booted from the top down to #3, because someday the world will come to appreciate the whaaaaa…? that was a minimal Imogen Heap tune filtered through a Jason Derulo pop song. More »



LIGHTS Battles Herself In ‘Ice’

Robbie Daw | November 11, 2009 1:00 pm
Robbie Daw | November 11, 2009 1:00 pm

iceLIGHTS, who’s currently on tour in her home country of Canada, unleashed the video for new single “Ice” on her MySpace. The clip features her happily jamming on her keytar at home until the Juno Award-winning 22-year-old’s evil doppelgänger appears, threatening to tip over her goldfish bowl! More »


The Owl City “Adult Onesie”: Wear It At Your Next Completely Sexless Sleepover

noah | November 5, 2009 10:30 am
noah | November 5, 2009 10:30 am

Such Great Hoots? Owl City Is A Rare Boy-Pop Chart-Topper

admin | October 30, 2009 4:00 pm
admin | October 30, 2009 4:00 pm

fireflies_coverBack in 1997, when I was a critic for CMJ, I led off my review of a new album by vintage Britpoppers the Sundays with the following sideswipe at another band:

“In the five years since their last album, [the Sundays] watched the Cranberries swipe their sound and turn it into three obscenely popular and dreck-filled albums.”

I can’t front: I had a soft spot for the Cranberries’ light-as-air Top 10 smash “Linger.” But I could never get past the fact that the Sundays, a better band with one major alternative hit to their name (the downy, warm-blanket 1990 Modern Rock chart-topper “Here’s Where the Story Ends”), had failed to cross over to the U.S. Top 40 while Dolores O’Riordan rampaged across my radio dial. The ’Berries weren’t awful, just… a little undeserving, and massively benefiting from someone else’s sound.

This week—unless he’s too busy counting his Twilight soundtrack money or canoodling with the missus—Ben Gibbard is probably feeling something similar. It’s got to be a bit galling that Owl City’s “Fireflies,” the new No. 1 song on Billboard‘s Hot 100, is a candied replica of a sound he and Jimmy Tamborello codified six years ago.

Again, I can’t front: on a Top 40 radio dial awash in Black Eyed Peas’ faux-hop and Miley Cyrus’s shrill Autotunage, “Fireflies” is a nice contrast. But it’s basically The Postal Service for Dummies, and it’s mystifying how easily it shot to No. 1 during the same decade when “Such Great Heights,” which some of us consider one of the best-written pop songs of the ’00s, didn’t even grace the Hot 100.

But you don’t have to be a Gibbard fan to still find Owl City’s feat bizarre. Because even if you’ve never heard of the Postal Service, “Fireflies” represents a head-scratching rarity: a No. 1 hit by a solo white guy with no other radio format to call home. More »



That Owl City Song Is No. 1 On The Pop Charts

noah | October 29, 2009 12:00 pm
noah | October 29, 2009 12:00 pm

Owl City’s “Fireflies” moved into the Hot 100 penthouse this week after shifting 196,000 paid downloads last week—it’s currently at No. 5 on the iTunes chart, behind a couple of bonus tracks from Taylor Swift’s re-released Fearless and Lady GaGa’s “Bad Romance.” More on this slightly unexpected triumph of post-Postal Service bedroom pop from Chris Molanphy on Friday, but for now, let’s all wonder if this means that the next Twilight soundtrack will move on from Pitchfork darlings to Jimmy Tamborellos in training. [Billboard / Dailymotion] More »