Continuing the empty, twee electronic notes that Kelly Time offered up, Owl City is set to make listeners suffer again with Adam, Check Please. The one-man bird city presents his latest single as either a search for a DJ by the name of Casey Connor or a professional lacrosse player that shares the same name. Perhaps it is the manager that employed Adam Young in this autobiographical cash-in. Either way, the digitised emptiness and stock subtitles that fade in over this colloquial nightmare are of the same function as the earliest intonations of his electropop vomit. Unbearably optimistic with vague courage at the heart of the every day, for those that unironically use the word “bop” to describe a piece of music, Adam, Check Please is, even to the passing listener, unbearable, grossly slick and phoned-in.
Narrative-driven and with an impressive collection of fans for a mainstream one-hit wonder, Owl City presents yet another track that charts a very dull life. Mondays after school and the fresh-faced excitement of youth are not reflected on but replicated by Adam Young, 36. Cold pizza, nervy first days and working the frozen section may reveal the truth of working in a store in his younger days but his life appears to be lifted from that of a post-Breakfast Club coming-of-age feature. An electronic interlude features within and still sound like Shinobu Tanaka of Mario Kart DS fame was enlisted in the studio. Adam, Check Please is a noisy mess that hopes that optimism alone will carry that weight. One-dimensional music is to be expected here.
Adam, Check Please instead feels like the glorious American Dream grift pumped with life once more. Young worked hard at a supermarket to learn the hard way that life is a curveball. Sentences as generic and empty as that are the working of every line on Adam, Check Please. Beyond the bankrupt technical innocence that carries over from the rough Cinematic release from 2018 is a sloppy mixing that has interjections that cannot crack through the laughable lyricisms. Young attempts to connect with the working man, telling of how proud he was to work a frozen section at a grocery store as if propaganda for keeping the blue-collar down was not abundantly frequent. Adam, Check Please attempts to show the roots of a singer whose message should be “anyone can make it” but it instead turns its tune to “you should be proud of your dead-end while I bask in the glory of your iTunes purchase”.
Not a single note of interest, not a word of real emotion. All of it is reflective for the sake of it and paired with an array of instruments that were presumably littering the studio. High pitches of whining instrumentals, a disgustingly upbeat positivity that hopes to deflect any sense of reality, Adam, Check Please tells its listeners to be proud of what they have until the glorious day they find their fame and footing. Adam Young is the Ben Platt of music. His latest track and presumably the upcoming Coco Moon are the Dear Evan Hansen of modern music. An audible example of the struggle of art as a genuine message rather than a buzzword collection of plain nostalgia. Tone deaf messaging, tone deaf mixing. What a pairing for Young and his collection of Strigiformes.
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