“When I’d call you up so we could shoot the moon,
These days I’m left to howl in tune.”

I’m gonna bust out my hipster cred and say that I liked Fun (or “fun.” if we’re feeling snobbish) before they were cool. My senior year of high school, they blew up with their second album’s three gigantic singles, but before that, they were just a modest indie pop outfit with visions of grandeur. I remember watching the Grammy Awards in 2013, when all those singles from Some Nights won them Best New Artist. Nate Reuss got up and in front of the audience and addressed the camera. “If this is in HD everybody can see our faces… and we are not very young.” The fact of the matter is that Reuss had been releasing music since he was 20 years old; I’m sure he didn’t feel like a new artist when the band accepted their Grammy weeks before his 31st birthday. I liked Some Nights well enough, but it simply didn’t compare to their wonderful debut from three years prior which I had spun about a hundred times by then.

After the dissolution of Reuss’s first band, The Format, he immediately contacted Andrew Dost, a multi-instrumentalist who had toured with The Format and previously played with Anthollo; and Jack Antonoff, the main force behind Steel Train. The trio were all well-acquainted as their bands had toured together, and as soon as Ruess called them up, the musicians packed their bags and headed to New Jersey to get down to business in Antonoff’s parents’ living room.

Nate Reuss is a unique artist in that he doesn’t play any instrument professionally. He is “just” a singer, but he’s really more of an orchestrator, surrounding himself with talented musicians who can bring the songs in his head to life. “I am not an easy person to work with in the studio,” he says. “It is not just about lyrics, it is not just about melodies. The whole entire song, I hear in my head. And not playing any instruments, it is really tough to kinda like say, horn part or whatever it is and then hope that someone understands it.” Reuss’s lofty visions are wonderfully fleshed out by Dost, who plays piano, guitar, glockenspiel, trumpet, flugelhorn, theremin, (basically everything), and Antonoff, who is a bit more traditional, playing only guitar (and bass and mandolin, etc.), piano, and drums. There’s hardly a dull moment across the album’s ten songs. Take the opener, the self-contradicting ‘Be Calm’, which by its end features Reuss maniacally screeching over top of a sonic bombardment of strings, trumpets, and guitars. The track also features accordion, cello, and calliope as it switches from twee indie pop to musical theater to punk rock without blinking.

But it’s disingenuous to throw out some line like “it’s classic pop meets indie rock.” Sure, there’s some Queen in there, some Electric Light Orchestra, some Beach Boys, along with some Weezer and other modern acts. But there’s clear Broadway influence as well, not to mention a smattering of punk rock guitars. Trying to pigeonhole Fun is a disservice to their mesmerizing ability to shapeshift on a whim and to combine those various styles at the same time. You can certainly point at individual elements—a crunchy riff, a gang vocal, a sappy lyric—and nod towards their lineage; but there’s always something else going on in close proximity that would not jibe with the notion that’s they’re directly lifting something. Listening to Aim & Ignite, you can pick out these intricate yet smooth transitions and juxtapositions between melodies, tempos, and styles that coalesce into a singular mosaic that’s familiar and yet completely fresh at the same time.

Last week my baby hit the slopes.
I spent the weekend setting traps in the road.
I should have been cutting out my eyelids.
You’ll never guess what baby did when she got home.

The startling creativity only presents itself if you listen with a discerning ear, though. On first pass, Fun’s debut album is pure pop bliss. These compositions are somewhat distant from one another stylistically, rarely stepping on each other’s toes, but they’re stripped of all elements that would hinder their aim towards exuberance. That’s not to say that the songs are lacking in artistic merit; the opposite, in fact. This is one of the most smartly composed pop records in recent years. It has its big choruses, memorable motifs, and romantic lyrics, but it never fumbles its grand ambition of walking that incredibly fine line between imminently palatable and artistically robust. With more than a dozen session musicians adding horns, strings, drums, and vocals, Aim & Ignite could have easily failed to fulfill its ambitions and devolved into a pompous mess. But Reuss and company’s starry-eyed optimism lifts the record to greatness.

Depending on the day and the mood, any song on the album could be considered its high point. I would posit that it is best experienced as a whole, but if I was forced to it, ‘Walking the Dog’ and ‘The Gambler’ are the tracks that stand out for me. ‘Walking the Dog’ begins with a catchy, rolling drum beat and a punchy guitar line but quickly morphs into an extravagant, high-spirited sing-a-long with a delicious mix of instrumentation.

‘The Gambler’ is a sappy love song that transcends its stereotype. It’s one of the album’s simplest songs, a piano-and-strings ballad about Reuss’s parents from the age of eighteen until old age. It’s another example of the band taking on a style and tone that, in lesser hands, would likely be bland and unremarkable. But Reuss instills his romantic language with real soul, and the song crafted around his poetry is intelligent and creative rather than the shallow compositions that usually accompany such songs. And that trick of half-mimicry, winking at you as they hook you with familiar sounds while sneaking juicy pop experiments in the back door, is typical of the album as a whole. There are nearly endless little flourishes that will make you sit back with a gleeful grin—a fleeting backing vocal, a tasty guitar fill, a cheeky turn of phrase.

I swear when I grow up, I won’t just buy you a rose.
I’ll buy you the flower shop, and you will never be lonely.

Aim & Ignite sounds like an album crafted with an ambition toward grandiosity but, somehow, also without a care for the world outside of the studio. It’s a joyous collection of songs by a group of musicians who relish creation for its own sake. Injecting some vigor and vitality into standard pop formulas, mixing and matching familiar patterns and melodies with elements of punk, indie rock, and Broadway, Fun’s singular debut is a zenith of modern pop music.

Favorite Tracks: Benson Hedges; Walking the Dog; The Gambler.

Sources:
“About — Fun”. OurNameIsFun.com. 5 May 2010. (Archived).

Perdani, Yuliasri. “Nate Ruess: On his bold solo endeavor”. The Jakarta Post. 23 August 2015.