Pitchfork calls Owl City's music "hack electronica"

​With Owl City's single, "Fireflies," skyrocketing to the #1 slot on the Billboard charts this week, the writers at Pitchfork thought it would be an opportune moment to cash in on some pageviews and take a big ol' dump on Owatonna native Adam Young's sugary electro-pop project. As we've seen before with the tastemaking site, when Pitchfork hates something, they really hate it, and they make no qualms about telling us exactly how insulted they feel by the sub-par quality of today's mainstream pop music.

The review is centered around comparing Owl City's Young to the Postal Service's Ben Gibbard (a longtime Pitchfork favorite), and the writer imagines a fictional rivalry between the two songwriters, listing off Gibbard's winning qualities -- including, unbelievably, a mention that "Gibbard is married to the fantasy of every guy this song was ostensibly written for." Take that, Owl City! Ben Gibbard "won" the imaginary contest by snagging a pretty lady!

(My feminist heart is aching, but we'll save that for another blog post.)

All ridiculous antics aside, the reviewer gets down to brass tacks in the second half and compiles a laundry list of reasons why he feels "Fireflies" deserves a rating of 1 out of 10. A sampling of some of the nastier ones: "Fireflies" employs "hack 'electronica' tricks" which are "delivered in an emasculated, cloying wheeze" by a guy who is "trying so hard to be sincere, he forgets to say what he actually means."

At least Pitchfork assigned the ass-kicking to an actual writer this time instead of uploading a video of a monkey peeing and calling it a day.