Some Nights is the only song of theirs I've heard, but it's one of my favorites. Oddly enough, at first I thought it was some kind of church choir song, or at Christian music.
"What's out there? What's waiting for me?"
You know what? Some Nights did actually remind me of a Christian rock song I once heard on a church retreat. It was "Shine" by The Newsboys.
But then Some Nights has a Precision F Strike that would completely derail any assumption it's Christian music, haha.
Some Nights is unlistenable to me because of it being afflicted by the Loudness War like so many other albums, whether mainstream or indie, pop or rock or rap or r&b.
Now that you mention the Loudness War, it did feel like "Some Nights" was unnecessarily loud at times, especially when the big drum parts kicked in.
Radio ruins good songs. Because stations say "hey, this song is popular, let's play it once an hour!" The fact that everything is pre-programmed and there basically are no true disc-jockeys left doesn't help either. This is especially true in Top 40, where the occasional gems get slotted in with all the rest of the junk to be played for a mostly critically-inept audience.
Still, I'd rather listen to an overplayed fun. track than 90% of the garbage that's on the radio. That counts for something.
Some Nights is significantly less brickwalled than Aim & Ignite, actually. The song "Some Nights" has a distorted synth playing along with the kick drum, making it sound clipped, but you can hear points where the drum hits without the synth if you listen closely. "It Gets Better" is ridiculously brickwalled, but presumably on purpose. Aim and Ignite though clips and brickwalls harder than anything on Some Nights with the exception of "It Gets Better," so I actually thought that Some Nights was refreshingly dynamic by comparison. Still not the best example, but a step in the right direction for sure.
That is, of course, in reference to the Loudness War related comments.
Personally, I\'d rather listen to almost anything other than fun.\'s three hit singles. They may have good album cuts, but I\'d have to say that based on their three dull, monotonous, lifeless, folky singles, that their name is extremely ironic. In 2012, their music seemed to suck the fun right out of the music industry. I\'d have to say based on what I\'ve heard, they\'re among the worst artists of this decade to have achieved the level of popularity that they have.
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I'm in two minds here.
First off, let me just say that fun., being (at least formerly) indie in nature, hold themselves to a much higher standard than most of the god-awful bland pop out there on the radio. It helps that singer Nate Ruess actually sounds just like Freddie Mercury, always a great artistic and creative role model to aspire to.
But the problem is, Ruess only sounds like Mercury when he's actually singing - on his own. This becomes particularly problematic on their sophomore album Some Nights, which is very much a Base Breaker because it adopts a more mainstream sound including, yes, the dreaded Auto Tune plague.
Here I bring up the Unwind Rule of Artistic Talent (paraphrased): "If you paint things wrong 'cause that's the best you can do, you're just a chump. You paint that way just 'cause you want to? Then you're an artist." fun. definitely falls under the second category in that they have proven themselves more than capable of producing non-mainstream-sounding music on their own merit. The trouble is, they really had no need to dabble in overproduction the way they did. They sounded just fine without it.
That's not to say that Some Nights is unlistenable. It's not, especially not the title track (despite the fact that it's extremely Narmy). Unfortunately, I have to say this song has suffered from extreme overexposure. It's really the kind of song that's good in small doses every so often, but to tune through various radio stations for an hour each day (even respectable alt-rock radio like the Bay Area's World-Class Rock station, the World-Famous KFOG), and be guaranteed that at some point you're going to hear "Some Nights" or, worse, "We Are Young," it really wears thin after a short while. Honestly, fun. has really become played out to death by now.
But hey, it could be worse. They could be ridiculously overhyped hacks (overhyped fun. is, yes, but talentless they are not) like Carly Rae Jepsen, Ed Sheeran, or Owl City. Or batshit-insane Attention Whores like Adam Levine. Or flavorless and completely devoid of personality like The Lumineers.
P.S. There really needs to be a review type for artists and groups. Calling this a Whole Series Review doesn't really seem right.