Toronto – Lets take a time machine. The year we are going back to is 2003. Queue up the Delorean, doc!

Wow. 2003. What a time. George W is still the president of the US, Friends was still on the error, and the Strokes were still in their early 20s. Ricky had just moved from dreary Edmonton to new and exciting Toronto and was in the process of stealing as many of his friend’s friends as possible.

What’s more, there’s this really cool collaboration between Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard and unknown DJ called Dntel. It’s called the Postal Service and it’s the perfect marriage between indie pop and electronic music. Suddenly, all the indie kids decided that hey, having a few blips and boops in the music isn’t that bad and all the electro kids were..well, they were still on ecstacy and mdma so they didn’t really decide anything. It was an exciting time, bust out a tune like ‘Such Great Heights’ on any dance floor and you were bound to see people going nuts. Everyone decided this project was just great and were inspired by it. It definitely made an impression Adam Young. It made such an impression on him that he decided to form an act that sounded EXACTLY LIKE the Postal Service.

This is what listening to Owl City is like. It is a shameless impersonation of a band that everyone loves. I remember putting this album on when me and my friends were playing a game of Puerto Rico and people were asking if this was Postal Service or Death Cab. I had to actually go to my laptop to make sure it wasn’t. That’s how much it sounds like the band.

Now to be honest, musical doppelgangers are quite common today. When the Libertines came out, there was all kinds of English bands that wanted to sound like them – Razorlight, The Paddingtons, etc. Same with the Strokes. I can’t even begin to list the amount of bands that tried to replicate that garagey rock sound the Strokes pulled off with ‘This is It’. However, most of these bands tried to put their own little signature in their music. Having listened to Owl City, I can hardly find anything that distinguishes it from the Postal Service. Granted, I’ve only listened to the album twice, but to me, that was enough.

Owl City is playing Toronto’s Sound Academy on April 27th. It is sold out, and the singles have been #1 on Billboard. So I guess in the end, it was probably a wise decision for Adam Young to completely emulate a popular band that everyone still loves.

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