21 January 2010
I haven’t heard ‘Fireflies’ by Owl City since its heyday: top of the US charts, no less, plus here Ireland’s first new number one single of the ’10s. Even then, so dreadful was the merest random snippet that I spent any inadvertent overhearings with my head in a half-wince, half-cringe. However, that’s hardly an ideal posture for receiving music. Also, I’m feeling brave: on these pages I’ve recently consumed every Westlife and Dustin number one, for God’s sake, so how dreadful can this be? Time for a proper attentive listen!
Early doors, the burbling, bleeping synth is more substantial than I recalled. Also, Adam Young’s vocal isn’t vocodered or Auto-Tuned into gimmickry; I must have misremembered that too. Could it be that ‘Fireflies’ really isn’t so dreadful after all?
But then, just as I’m tentatively starting to let out some slack towards Owl City and ‘Fireflies’, in comes the chorus and I tie that slack up into a cat o’ nine tails. All these years I must have blanked out the lyrics, because they’re truly horrendous: “I’d get a thousand hugs / From ten thousand lightning bugs / As they tried to teach me how to dance” is the simpering faux-naïveté of a Barney song. And all of a sudden the bleeping synth and Young’s early-teen singing voice swell into a wave of infantile, saccharine mush.
The retro-kids-bedroom video (below) confirms that all this pre-pubescent ick is by design. Perhaps the aim was a Toy Story riff on the suburban-homespun video for Vanessa Carlton’s ‘A Thousand Miles’, but ‘Fireflies’ has none of that song’s heartsore yearning, robust musicality or folksy charm. Turns out it really was that dreadful after all.
