For Owl City, Factory is a cynicism-free zone

The Nashville synth-pop band Paper Route's opening set at the Electric Factory on Sunday was almost over, but singer J.T. Daly still had one more question for the audience: "Do you guys like YouTube?"

Even by the "Hello, Cleveland" standards of stage banter, it was a fairly weak attempt to solicit an audience response, but it worked. The audience, a sea of teenage faces dotted by the occasional parent or guardian, wasn't about to let a tired bit of stagecraft get in the way of their desire to yell. A more jaded observer might have rolled his eyes, but this crowd didn't care if they'd heard it all before - or perhaps they just hadn't.

There is no room for cynicism in the music of Owl City, who headlined the three-band bill. Initially the product of Adam Young, his laptop, and untold hours in his parents' Minnesota basement, the band's songs gaze in wide-eyed wonder at the outside world.

Considering that Young went from posting early songs on his MySpace page to topping the singles charts with the blippy "Fireflies," he has reason to be a tad starry-eyed. But all that guilelessness can be grating just the same.

Young's lyrics are romantic but parent-friendly, brimming with the unedited excesses of teenage mash notes and the immediacy of a Twitter tweet. "The stars lean down to kiss you, and I lie awake and miss you," he sang in "Vanilla Twilight," whose title is so bland it's almost defiant. If you winced when Young got to the part in "Fireflies" about receiving "a thousand hugs from ten thousand lightning bugs," you were most definitely in the wrong place.

Owl City's sound, fleshed out on stage with a drummer, two keyboardists, and a two-woman string section, is heavily reminiscent of the electronic melancholy of the Postal Service, to the point that a casual listener would be hard-pressed to distinguish between them.

But where the latter's songs have the hushed intimacy of bedroom recordings, Young's are as calculated and unrevealing as a Facebook update. He's not expressing sensitivity so much as demonstrating it. When he sings about "pickin' apples in late September" in "The Bird and the Worm," it feels like a Walt Disney version of a rural childhood, all dappled leaves and watercolor sunsets.

Another of the opening bands, Valerie Poxleitner, better known as Lights, is less dissembling about her songs' pop forebears. She sang the exuberant "River" with one hand on a stack of keyboards and the other in the air, urging the audience on and seeming like part of it as well.