Young’s a pretty transparent guy – even though the premises of a lot of his songs can be rather cutesy and sometimes downright surreal, he’s not shy about making the moral of the story obvious in most cases (at least, when there is a moral beyond just playing around with the synths and beats and having a sunny good time). For better or worse, it’s the sentiment that gives Owl City’s fifth album (seventh if you count his two indie releases) a reason for being, with many of its 15 songs offering little vignettes from various points in Young’s personal life, as if the grand total of all of his little adventures and misadventures was meant to paint some bigger picture outlining his philosophy on life.
I normally wouldn’t spoil the ending of an album in the very first line of a review, but let’s be honest here – unlike the sort of plot twist in a genuinely compelling film that might prompt you to go back and look at the rest of the story with new eyes, this isn’t exactly a surprising revelation. “Your life is a movie.” That’s the sentiment that Adam Young, best known as the lone permanent member of the synthpop outfit Owl City, chooses us to leave us with at the end of his sprawling new hour-long album, appropriately titled Cinematic.
While sifting through 15 songs (and 3 alternate versions!) to find those rare gems is generally not a delightful experience, this album might still be a step up from Mobile Orchestra.
In Brief: Somewhere within this hodgepodge of bland personal anecdotes and ill-advised bits of genre-hopping, are a small handful of truly imaginative synthpop songs that remind me of why I once risked the scorn of fellow critics to proclaim that I actually liked Owl City.
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