Kids These Days: Some Nights, Reviewed

by Chris Marshall:

Greetings, dear readers. I know it’s been ages since I posted anything. I’ve got an excuse, sort of, in that I stopped posting regularly right around the time I took on a new position at my job that required me to write 17 articles every week, and after all that, I never really felt like writing anything else.

But the itch has struck me again. Those work articles are often interesting, but they are formulaic, and I never get to write freely. So here I am again with the first (and hopefully not last) entry in a new blog series idea I came up with, which I’m calling Kids These Days.

It all started about a week ago, when I was reading Entertainment Weekly’s preview of the Grammys, which will have aired earlier tonight, by the time this post goes up. I was looking through the nominees, and I realized that, not only had I never listened to any of them, I’d never even heard of quite a few of them.

As a trivia junkie, this was unsettling. How could I have fallen so far out of touch? It’s not a case of musical elitism or anything like that. I just rarely ever listen to music. I don’t know anything about it, and I’m incapable of appreciating it on the level that some people are. I’m missing a gene or something.

Every now and then, I’ll be listening to, and then writing about, some hip new album the kids are listening to these days. Again, I know nothing about music, so don’t expect any level of expertise. I can’t talk about it on any kind of technical level, and rarely will I be able to discuss something in comparison to a previous artist/song/album, since I probably don’t know about it, either.

Without further ado, here’s the first Kids These Days entry, in which I listened to Some Nights by the orthographically-difficult band fun.

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Ok, so it would be misleading to say that I knew nothing about fun. before I listened to the album. I’d heard the big songs several million times here and there, even if I had no idea who was singing them. However, before I go on any further, I’m going to make things easier on myself by referring to them as Fun from now. I’m already getting tired of correcting Word, and I’ve only written it once in the middle of a sentence.

Honestly, much to my surprise, I didn’t hate this album. I’ve got a feeling I’ll never listen to it anymore after its moment is done, but if I don’t actively despise it, I consider that a victory. It’s inoffensive, poppy, radio-friendly stuff, and I suppose there’s nothing wrong with that. Nate Ruess is an impressive singer, and the heavy auto-tuning sounds pretty cool most of the time.

The album is frontloaded with their two biggest hits, starting with “Some Nights” and “We Are Young” after a brief intro that name-drops the Tea Party and Twitter, two references that may or may not be incomprehensible when people are listening to it twenty years down the road. As overplayed as “We Are Young” is in particular, I certainly understand the appeal, and I’m prone to sing along myself every time I hear it.

“Some Nights” is just a good song, in my opinion. If there’s one track from this album that I’ll come back to, it’ll be that one. It’s catchy and it’s fun. I’m sure the lyrics are deep and important, too, but I’ve never really taken the time to listen to them that closely. You know how it is.

The rest of the album is fine, if forgettable. There aren’t any real standouts in the back half, but there weren’t any true duds, either. They all just sort of blended in together, so much so that I had to listen to them all again to remember which was which.

The group has just won Best New Artist at the Grammys, so maybe they’ll have at least the staying power of previous winners Jesus Jones and Shelby Lynne. My inexpert opinion leads me to believe they’ll be one-and-done, but who can ever tell these days?  Also, did you know that Bob Newhart won the same award in 1961? Life is full of surprises.

I realized while working on this that I don’t really know how to write about music, so this series might not last very long. Enjoy it while you can. But anyway, I give “Some Nights” three stars out of five. I guess. I’m just making stuff up here.

Favorite Song: “Some Nights”
Least Favorite Song: “It Gets Better”
fun. Fact: Guitarist Jack Antonoff is dating the most famous person in the world, Lena Dunham.
Baffling Line from Review: “Classic bubble-pop tunefulness with rococo rock & roll,” –Jody Rosen, Rolling Stone