All Things Bright and Beautiful

Owl City, has conquered the dizzying heights of mainstream success in the gentlest, most soft-spoken way possible. The electro-pop of 'Ocean Eyes' (which featured the runaway hit "Fireflies") captured the world's attention; making people everywhere swoon as though they were lying down on a marshmallow cloud. Adam Young's adventures over the past two years are evocatively detailed on the impossibly catchy electro-pop songs that make up Owl City's new album, 'All Things Bright and Beautiful'.

On 'All Things Bright and Beautiful', the music and lyrics conspire to make listeners feel as if they were stepping into another world - a verdant musical dreamland where "reality is a lovely place, but I wouldn't want to live there," as Young sings on the opening track "The Real World". Images of abundance, like a backyard of butterflies ("Honey and the Bee"), blossoms filling a room ("Hospital Flowers"), and "sunsets that dazzle in the dusk" ("Dreams Don't Turn To Dust") unfold alongside starry-eyed imaginings of cherry bombs staining blackbirds red ("Kamikaze") and dipping one's toes in the galaxy ("Alligator Sky").

'All Things Bright and Beautiful' also finds Young expanding his sonic palette, playing around with a harder-edged vocal delivery on "Kamikaze", majestic strings on "Dreams Don't Turn To Dust", euphoric dancefloor tempo on "The Yacht Club" (featuring guest vocals by Canadian singer Lights), and straight-up piano pop on "Plant Life" (which Young wrote with Relient K's Matthew Thiessen). The experimentation comes from Young's evolving confidence as a songwriter, musician, producer, and engineer. As with 'Ocean Eyes', Young produced and engineered the album himself (before mixing it together with veteran mixer Jack Joseph Puig). "For the actual production of the album, tonality and texture played a larger part," Young says. "I knew I wanted it sound bigger and be more dynamic than Ocean Eyes, so I put more time into trying to figure out how to do my job better from a technical standpoint. I had to polish up my knowledge so I could bring the sounds I heard in my head to life."