Fun.--Be Calm

Be Calm



I picked up this album last week and I can't get enough of it. I never listened to the Format, never even heard of them I don't think, but I guess this is the spinoff of its remains. But that's as far as I care to place this band in any context—as far as I'm concerned, Fun.(that period is annoying as shit) is totally divorced from any time or trend...not because they're that original, but because they're that exceptionally derivative.

The whole record is like a tour of the best and kitchiest from the last thirty years of pop history—there's ELO and Queen in heavy doses, late 80's power ballads (I'm thinking of you, Firehouse—represent!), 90's GooGoo Doll grunge pop, Graceland/Vampire Weekend, the multi-instrumentation of post-NMH Indie, tons of Andrew Lloyd Weber, 80's pop saccharine, the structure and bombast of Meatloaf/Jim Steinman, and heaping portions of 70's singer-songwriter sincerity. The homage is so clear and rapid-fire, that it's almost like listening to samples instead of influences . It's low-art Frankenstein, and I love it. But the one influence that's notably absent—as in like COMPLETELY absent—is any sort of reserve or irony.

I mean, there's an entire fucking song about an old couple holding hands in their back-yard and what an awesome life they've had—and how their kids are all grown, and awesome, and how totally great it is that they did it all together...and I keep waiting for him to say that he's regretted the whole thing, or there's another woman, or doesn't mortality suck, or she has cancer...but it doesn't happen. They just hug it out or something and the song ends. Which is kind of jarring in it's jarringlessness. Also, it rulz, and I actually find it kind of moving.

So I'm going to try to just do a running diary of the opening track which I've heard like twenty times already—we'll see how it goes. Somehow, I think a stream of consciousness review probably suits this song the best—if ever there were a band that delighted in the ephemeral moment—it's these fools.

We start with some poignant stage-setting violins, like some Gone With The Wind prologue, which die out and usher us into some Rentish moping about love-lost with the violins keeping time. And then the falsetto kicks in, with soft Queen harmony behind and you know something's coming when he starts talking really quick about bodegas. I think there's an accordion, too. Then our first crescendo head-fake. Instead, there's some sort of angsty conversation between multiple voices going on over a 2000ish pop synth-beat. It's probably in his head—not that it matters. Then he does some weird rapping with the beats and hand-claps and violins building behind him and the crescendo comes for real...and there are horns and they kick ass and it's resplendent with self-affirming cheese. It's R. Kelly via Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. But maybe that wasn't the real crescendo, because we've shifted into ELO sound laced over Jellyfish power-pop, and this seems to be going somewhere else. And then the falsetto hits a new place, like the key change in Living on a Prayer—and there probably can't be another level, because we're at least three crescendos in at this point. But there might be...because there's the time-tested pause that tells you something else awaits. And now we're re-crescendoing that last-crescendo this time at the lower octave that hammers the sincerity—I think Heart pulled this trick in Alone--and there's no way that there can really be a song in which the dude is telling me “be calm, I know you feel like you're breaking down”, is this really all about empathy and everything will be all right? And he cracks his voice to show he really means it. And then we close with the same sad violins that opened, and Scene. That's how you close a first act.