Skip to content
Reviews

Owl City, ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ (Universal Republic)

Imagine you’re five years old. You’ve never heard the Postal Service, never had your heart broken, and never swallowed anything stronger than gumdrops. You’d have no reason not to love this synth-pop equivalent of a totally awesome plush toy. Featuring 11 miniscule variations on “Fireflies,” the giddy worldwide smash that put home-studio boffin Adam Young on the map, this unrelentingly wide-eyed follow-up offers more genteel Christian rock reconfigured as techno lite. The world should be this polite. But it’s not.