Album from 2012
I sort of stumbled upon this weeks record. I was actually at the record store trying to get a new needle and I happened to see "Some Nights" by fun. sitting out in front. Now, this is yet another one that I already own the CD of, but it's not one that I've listened to obsessively, and not one that I particularly love, which I thought would make a nice contrast from the last two weeks, when it maybe felt like I was gushing a little too much.
I can deal with overexposure, and with bands that I like becoming more than just a personal thing, and to some extent I can deal with bands trying to tweak their sound a little to appeal to a larger audience. It's just when all of those things coincide with a step down in quality that I'm not as forgiving.
At this point, I'm sure plenty of people have heard from their indie-rock hipster-kid friends that fun. like, totally sold out, man, and that they used to be, like, way better. And it's basically true. Their first album, "Aim and Ignite," was fantastic, and one of my favorites. I was excited about another album, and I even remember being excited when I heard "We Are Young" in that Super Bowl commercial, saying things like, "Hey that's fun.!" and "they're totally going to blow up now, it's going to be awesome." And they did, which I love. But they lost the oddly specific sound from their first album that was part of the reason it was so great. I actually didn't expect to like them. I was a fan of Steel Train and the Postelle's, who were opening up for fun. on their first tour after "Aim and Ignite," and I wasn't planning on staying. A friend told me to stay, that I'd like it. And my immediate thought when they stepped on the stage was that this friend didn't know me too well. I mean, Nate walks up wearing the skinniest of skinny jeans, Jack's got these huge-rimmed glasses, their name is a total grammatical nightmare, with all lower-case and a period at the end which are clearly only there to be contrarian, and perhaps to let their name stand out from actual fun, but in the end, I bought the CD right there at the merch table by the end of the concert.
Almost all of their songs have a very unpredictable feeling, almost like they start out following a template, but find a way to change it halfway through. There's all sorts of twists and turns, tempo changes and lines of lyrics that keep going well after you thought they were going to end. The lyrics themselves keep in line with this, as Nate Reuss is constantly using words that almost don't go together, creating a sort of surreal feeling that doesn't describe a specific situation so much as it does a mindset. All of their songs feature Nate belting things out, and sliding his voice around the music in ways that most singers don't do, and most people couldn't do if they tried (which is sort of a minor problem with their songs becoming much more popular, ex. the chorus to "We Are Young" is just straight up hard to sing a long to).
Pretty much all of these things on "Some Nights," including similar themes of redemption, love, and heartbreak, which isn't so much a continuing theme in fun.'s music as much as it is a continuing theme in all of music ever. There's still something that doesn't quite feel the same, and it's the way the music is produced, I think. Now, I don't know a lot about music production or recording or mixing or anything like that; I'm by no means an expert or even a casual fan. But there was something about the way "Aim and Ignite" sounded that almost made me think of those videos where Jimmy Fallon and the Roots sing popular songs with children's toys. It's almost like a homemade feeling, with literal bells and whistles at the fringes of the songs.
"Some Nights" lacks that homemade feeling, and it's no surprise that Jeff Bhasker, the albums producer, has worked with Kanye West, Kid Cudi, Jay-Z, Bruno Mars, Beyonce, and Robin Thicke (to name a few). There's a much more bombastic feel to these songs, they're anthemic to the point where I picture the person singing it standing on top of a mountain reaching their arms out above them, grasping at clouds.
But this bigger sound came at the expense of smaller noises, more nuanced little fills and asides. The opener, titled "Some Nights Intro," really does set the tone here, as it's an operatic, Queen-themed, two minute-long song, about people changing and some nights being different from most nights. I actually really like this song, even though it's not much, and mostly just an introduction.
It's the sound like the auto-tune about three minutes through "Some Nights," whatever the sound is that's happening throughout most of "It Gets Better" (which might be the smoke monster from "Lost"), the pounding of most of "One Foot," and the back half of "Stars," that really bother me. In places, it's almost an abandonment of the mission statement for a career that "Aim and Ignite" made four years earlier.
I'm not so music-Luddite that I don't understand the appeal of large and bubbly sounds, or of auto-tune when used as it's own instrument (instead of trying to hide it as the artists own voice), but that doesn't mean that I have to like it, and ignore the fact that it's a clear cash-grab.
Now, I know that artists must grow and change with each album, and I'm not saying that's the problem, and I know that we can't blame artists for not being the exact thing that we expect them to, and even to some extent we can't be mad at them for wanting a larger audience, so I am still really looking forward to a new fun. album, just not as much as I was looking forward to the second one.
But honestly, enough about that. There's still some really good sounding songs on this album, ones that I could easily imagine trading in the single loudest noise in each of their musical makeup for a set of sounds that create a more hectic and colorful song. Songs like "Why Am I The One," "All Alone," and the albums bonus track, "Out on the Town." In fact, before the album came out, I had a live version of "It Gets Better" that was tolerable to listen to, and I really like it.
I like most of the songs on the album, even the stripped down version of "It Gets Better," and maybe if there were a better version of "Stars," I might be convinced to listen to it, but those versions aren't on this vinyl. Putting the record on didn't really make me re-think anything about this album, except that it almost amplified it's use of a single sound in places where it could have expanded itself outward. I'm human, after all, and I sing to "We Are Young" when I hear it, including when I'm just sitting here by myself listening to the vinyl, and I stomp my feet to "One Foot," which is basically all that fun. need from this album: things that they can add to their live repertoire that will rile the crowd and keep up the energy that they are constantly building, building, building, searching for a climax. The songs work in that sense, I've seen them twice since "Some Nights," and the first time was too close to the release of the album because they were still playing a ton of songs from it, but the second time they used these songs smartly within their setlist, and of course, "We Are Young" brought the house down both times.
But an album has to stand on its own regardless of live shows and acoustic versions, and "Some Nights" does less so than I would have liked. Since about a week after "Some Nights" came out, I've been waiting for the third fun. album, because in a way, it'll dictate what I can expect from them for the rest of their career. If this was a hip-hop experiment, and next the band decides to mold their indie/punk/pop-rock to some other genre, or if they tone it down and go back to a more expansive and inclusive sound, then perhaps we can expect "Some Nights" to be the outlier, or even the furthest edge of their sound. But if it builds on what "Some Nights" started, assuming that there's more to this sound, then maybe "Aim and Ignite" will be the outlier. It doesn't matter, though, because I consider "Aim and Ignite" to be good enough that I'll probably buy their next three or four albums no matter what the previous one was like. But if there's more things like that awful lisp-y sound effect on Nate's vocals at the end of "Stars," it probably won't stick with me for too long, and I probably won't buy a copy of the vinyl unless I need something to write about.
Last Week's: Southeastern by Jason Isbell
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