Nate Ruess, we miss you, where are you?
Review of fun.'s 2009 album "Aim and Ignite"
fun.—Aim and Ignite
Released August 25, 2009
Ah, 2012. The year of “Call Me Maybe,” “Starships,” and “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.” The band fun., consisting of lead singer Nate Ruess, Andrew Dost, and future producer du jour Jack Antonoff, released their second album Some Nights. The first single from the album, “We Are Young,” became the soundtrack of that year, being featured in Glee and a Chevrolet Super Bowl XLVI commercial. I loved that song, as well as the other singles and in fact the rest of the album. I was in my elitist phase, trying (and ultimately) failing to pretend I wasn’t interested in the newest teenage pop fad, One Direction. It wouldn’t be long until I succumbed to their floppy hair and British charm, but before then, I was falling for what I thought of as the ugly bands. Really, that’s what I thought—that their music was good because the band members themselves were ugly. I also lumped The Wanted and Rixton in with that group. Sorry, lads. (and RIP Tom Parker)
But before fun. reached number 20 on the year-end Billboard Top 200 with Some Nights, their first album Aim and Ignite served as an introduction to the new musical project of Ruess, the . former lead singer of the band The Format, Dost who toured with and did some work with The Format, and Antonoff, formerly of Steel Train who toured with The Format, in his pre-Bleachers and pre-pop producer juggernaut era.
It’s hard to ignore the elephant in the room—Jack Antonoff is now one of the pop world’s biggest and most in-demand producers, working with everyone from Taylor Swift to Lana Del Rey, Lorde, St. Vincent, Clairo, the 1975, Sabrina Carpenter, The Chicks and Kendrick Lamar. And love him or hate him, you can’t deny his role as the de facto pop music architect in the early 2020s. As for Antonoff's own feelings on the band fun., he seems rather ambivalent about the whole thing, saying “I don’t want to be defined by this.” But had it not been for this band, “We Are Young” and its wild, if unexpected, success, as well as Antonoff’s own propensity for bringing out the best in whoever he collaborates with, then we would not be where we are now in terms of pop music at its current moment.
Much of the good will for this album seems to come from Ruess’ former band The Format, which are very much front of mind for nearly every contemporary reviewer in 2009. In many ways, Aim and Ignite is treated like a continuation of The Format’s short, but impactful career and I can somewhat understand where that comes from. The album was produced by Steven McDonald, who worked with Ruess on the final Format album Dog Problems. And it appears that The Format had enough fans who were willing to give fun. a fair shake, with Nancy Dunham for the Washington Post writing that the fact that fun. was made up of these musicians from other bands was “interesting enough to allow us to forgive [Aim and Ignite.]” Instead of being thought of as the first fun. record, this album is often held up under a microscope in comparison to the last Format record, with reviewers saying Aim and Ignite “used previous Format tricks like using bright horns and sophisticated harmonies,” and that this album “failed to live up to the Format’s last outing,” with the fun. album “nearing parody.” The reigning crown jewel throughout both projects, getting universal praise, is Ruess’ songwriting. Called “cynically clever,” where he deals with dark themes on Dog Problems like the near-death of his father, his songs for fun. are lighter, if not “drown[ing] at the cheesy end of theatrical pop.”
My favorites are “Be Calm,” “Benson Hedges,” “All the Pretty Girls,” “I Wanna Be The One,” and “The Gambler.” I wanted to put “Take Your Time (Coming Home)” in favorites, but with the caveat that it is entirely too long. 7 minutes and 51 seconds?!
On the whole, I like the melodies in most of the songs and especially so the more times I listened. The first time through I thought all the songs sounded a bit too same-y to really be able to differentiate one song from another. But after more listens, I started to hear each songs’ unique identity and did find myself enjoying the album as a whole more.
This album has a very similar vibe to their second album in that both are very theatrical, but where Some Nights is tighter, poppier, and more engineered to be accessible for a mainstream audience, this album is granted permission to exist in its own quirky, almost camp kind of way. Because it does share similarities with Some Nights, there is much of this album that feels familiar despite being the first time I’m hearing it.
I was interested to see fun. on the Fueled by Ramen label, a label I mostly associate with emo and pop punk groups of the late aughts and early 2010s. Even more surprising to me was seeing that fun. opened for Paramore, a FBR alum, on their 2010 headline tour before signing with the label themselves. The band later opened for Panic! at the Disco on their 2011 Vices & Virtues tour. Between the two bands, I can see the relationship between fun. and Panic! more, with Panic! also being a very theatrical band and heavily indebted to Queen. But how fun. became an indie pop band with Some Nights from being so closely associated with the pop punk, Fueled by Ramen crowd, I’m not exactly sure. Let this be yet another example of how genre is a fickle thing, and the ways we determine genre remain more of a subjective art than a fixed science. One way of deciding where an artist fits is by looking at their audience and their associations with other bands through opening gigs. In the case of fun., they could very easily be classified as pop-punk or emo, if we went by this metric of association alone. But I would argue that just having the theatricality in common with Panic! At the Disco is not enough to put them in this genre category. Instead, I would put them in the pop slash indie pop category, especially given the smoother, pop sound of Some Nights.
The theatricality of fun. as a band has also generated comparisons between them and another very theatrical, camp band, Queen. While Queen is considered one of the greatest rock bands of all time, in some part thanks to the resurgence of interest from the Bohemian Rhapsody biopic in 2019, many reviews seemed to think this comparison to the legendary band was a net negative for fun.. Putting the music of Queen in the same genre and style neighborhood as musical theatre, namely Hairspray, one reviewer notes this as an example of the album’s originality, although I think they do this facetiously and insincerely.
Yet again invoking what I call the “Golden Hour Effect,” fans and contemporary critics alike seem too hung up on Dog Problems to really allow Aim and Ignite to stand on its own two feet. And I can totally understand where that tendency comes from, there is so much overlap and continuation from The Format to fun.. However, regardless of how similar this album may or may not be from the work of The Format, this is a separate, standalone project. It has its own identity and as a band, fun. deserved the chance to forge their own future without the shadow of one member’s former group hanging over their heads.
As much as I like the theatricality of this album, it does tend to drone on over the course of the tracklist. The first few songs are really great, interesting and unique, but by track 5, “At Least I’m Not As Sad (As I Used to Be),” I’m over it. “Barlights,” “The Gambler,” and “Take Your Time (Coming Home)” start to win me back, but in the end, I think the front half of the album is stronger than the back half.
As with any decade in terms of music and culture, the 2010s were a period of transitory momentum and change. The decade that saw Taylor Swift upgrade to the next level of stardom when she went from country to pop, Mumford and Sons invoked the folk revival which in turn created the bearded-Brooklyn-craft-beer hipster epidemic, and both the formation, hiatus, and solo career spin-offs of boyband One Direction. fun. was caught up within this fluctuating period where the decade started with Max Martin dance-pop and ended with an emphasis on confessional lyrics against a recycled ‘80s guitar riff with Jack Antonoff ultimately defining the dominant sound with his production collaborations toward the end of the decade. For their part, fun. became a standout group in the first half of the decade, helping to define what this period of time would sound like. For some bands, sounding too much like a specific time makes them dated, but for me, the sound of fun. reminds me of a time when I was coming into my own as a music listener. I was determining what music I liked outside of any external influence for the first time, and I was developing my own taste and opinions, so for me, fun. will always have sentimental value for that role they played in my life.
The thing about this album and its creators in general is that it is built on the foundation of pop connoisseurs. For whatever the growing pushback is out there against poptimism, the philosophy of some music critics that would ascribe pop music to the same level of seriousness and worthiness of consideration as rock or any other genre, fun. is obviously “made by musicians who clearly understand the limits and potential of pop music.” And arguably (although not really much of an argument) it is the musicians’ foundation in pop that makes this album so successful as “the most consistent pop album.” It stands to reason that creators who are so well-versed, indebted to pop music would make the best pop music because they thoroughly understand the genre and its boundaries.
I was very surprised to find that I struggled to source contemporary reviews from 2009 for this album. More than anything about the band themselves, this is a sad note to make about the state of digital media, cultural media, and archiving digital artifacts. Archivists, librarians, and researchers have been ringing the alarm bells for a few years about the growing digital decay and loss of digital artifacts. Sites like Vice and MTV News deleted their entire archives of digitally published pieces after the media outlets themselves filed for bankruptcy. Like a white knight, the Internet Archive Wayback Machine was able to preserve those archival materials for posterity. But a flaw in using the Wayback Machine is you have to know what link you are searching for in order to find an archived backup copy in the database. Unlike Google, I can’t use the Internet Archive as a search engine to find since-deleted and now-archived articles on a specific subject. As we continue to lose media outlets due to dwindling budgets, mismanagement, and declining public support for journalism at large, we can’t possibly hold on-to the url of every link we have ever and will ever want to revisit in the hopes that some good samaritan had the foresight to archive the page. We must do more to support digital media, support journalists, support culture writers (shameless self-promotion and preservation), and archive our cultural and digital artifacts.
Also, just as an aside, because it really has no bearing on the music he makes, but Nate Ruess’ two major public relationships have been with Rachel Antonoff, sister of bandmate Jack Antonoff, from 2009 to 2013 and Charlotte Ronson, sister of Mark Ronson, from 2014 until recent. If I had a nickel for every time Nate Ruess dated a fashion designer sister of a famous music producer, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot, but weird that it happened twice.
I’ve recently, meaning in the last six months or so, decided that fun.’s second album Some Nights is one of my favorite albums of all time, both for its nostalgia factor and also for its pioneering status. And while this album is very similar to that one, I just prefer Some Nights to Aim and Ignite. I’m still glad I went back to dig into this record. There are a few songs that I really loved and now I understand more about this band that is emblematic of a specific time in music and in my life. But okay guys, I think 10 years has been long enough, where’s that fun. LP 3??