SOUNDTRACK: FUN.-Some Nights (2012).
I didn’t realize that this wasn’t Fun.’s debut album. I hadn’t heard of them until, well, until they got pretty big. Sarah got this for me for Christmas in 2012 on the recommendation of an NPR list. Of course, my biggest surprise was playing it Christmas morning and hearing the word fuck twice in the first song. Merry Christmas, kids!
I read recently that the band really liked Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy so much that they hired the same producer to get that sound. And that makes a ton of sense on the style and final product here–big grandiose sounds that are layered and layered and dense. The difference of course is that Fun. writes more catchy/poppy songs with a pop rock sheen. And the Queen comparisons are unavoidable. But with auto-tune.
“Some Nights (intro)” opens the disc with a quiet piano intro that builds to what you’re really going to get here–dramatic, theatrical, anthemic over the top pop rock. Because after a minute when the backing vocals come in, it sounds pretty much like an updated modern day Queen. While lead singer does bellow like Freddy Mercury the Queenisms come more from the backing vocals and the orchestrations.
The first song proper, “Some Nights” has a more polished, more poppy sheen to it. And like the rest of the album, it has a huge sing along chorus with whoa hos and everything. It’s nearly inevitable that they would become huge because of this album.
And yet, despite all the pop, I like this record a lot. The artsy, theatricality is so over the top. And really each song is like a mini showstopper. “We Are Young” has the title of an anthem and thus the song is an anthem. It starts with just drums but after some clever lyrics, it shifts to a slow building chorus that the world can sing along to. The same is true for “Carry On,” a slow piano ballad that builds in a big anthemic chorus. “It Gets Better” is a bit more electronic and fast paced from the start. “Why Am I the One” slows things down again, this time with guitars. But again each one has a big sing-along chorus.
“All Alone” is a bit more electronic (with harpsichords!) and a little more drum heavy, while “All Alright” stays anthemic throughout.
What’s surprising really is the lyrical content–he sings a lot about loving his parents (there’s a few shout outs to his mom). I admit I don’t entirely know what’s happening on the album–I haven’t looked at the lyrics too carefully, but it seems far more introspective and personal than big anthemic pop hooks would suggest.
“One Foot” is the first song that diverges a bit from the formula–it’s still a big stomping song, but the way the main riff is played on orchestral hits rather than more conventional instruments points to the more Top 40 elements of the band. And the final song, “Stars” really tips the balance. This is the one song that I don’t really care for. It’s 7 minutes long and the melody is more pop than artsy. The song builds in a less dramatic and more poppy way. This song has the most mom intensive lyrics: “Most nights I stay straight and think about my mom–oh god I miss her so much.” By 2 minutes it devolves into an auto-tuned ballad where the Kanye influence really rears its head. For the last 3 minutes or so it is a string filled ballad with crazy auto-tuned vocals (especially when they harmonize!). It’s a bit much even for me, although I think it works pretty great as an album ender.
The strange thing about that is that there is one song after it. It turns out that it’s a bonus track, which i didn’t realize until recently. I couldn’t imagine why you’d put a song after that autotuned nonsense. So it makes sense as a bonus track, although after “Stars,” I’m done with the album. The song, “Out on the Town” brings back the guitars but the “oh oh oh oh” in the beginning is really boy band like. And I fear the whole set up is more commercial than theater. So, no real bonus for me.
Basically, the album sounds quite the same throughout (in that it is big and theatrical, although there are some differences that distinguish the songs enough). And if you don’t like one of the songs there’s not going to be much here for you. But if you like your theatricality over the top, you could do worse than Fun. Just get ready to sing along.
[READ: October 1, 2014] The Original of Laura
I have had Nabokov on my list of authors to read for a long time. I have read and enjoyed a few of his books and planned to read his oeuvre at some point, just not quite yet. And then, as serendipity would have it, I stumbled on a book of his novellas (the Penguin classic edition) and decided to read them. Because they aren’t really meant to be taken as one item, I’m going to mention them individually.
The Original of Laura is a controversial release because of its history. And it seems that more words have been written about the history of the book than the actual content of it. So I will summarize the history by saying that Vladimir said that if he didn’t finish the book that it should be destroyed. Vladimir’s wife did not destroy the book and some thirty years later his son Dmitri decided to publish it [cue cat fights and gnashing of teeth].
The interesting way the book was published was as a series of index cards. Nabokov wrote all of his stories on index cards. The book version is on heavy card stock in which all of the index cards were reproduced and the words were typed below (errors and cross outs and all). And all the pages are perforated for, in theory, the reader’s ability to mix and match the pages as apparently Nabokov did.
This seems like a cool idea except that most of the index cards are numbered, so it’s not like there is any doubt as to what order they should go in. The final cards are not numbered, but again, they are pretty much sequential–there’s not a lot of play at play here. (more…)
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SOUNDTRACK: DAVID BOWIE-“The Laughing Gnome” (1967).
I have always liked David Bowie. Never loved him, but always liked his radio hits (and a bit more). Suffice it to say that I have never heard of “The Laughing Gnome” before reading about it in this book.
I Just Read About That... 