fun. - Aim and Ignite - 2009
"Have you ever wondered about our old nu-metal friends and what became of them?"
In the early summer of 2009 I got an email from the owner of a blog that I read and occasionally wrote for. It was pretty simple. "We don't like this album but I think you will."
Or something like that. That's how I remember it.
Anyway. I bought the album based on that recommendation and that's where all this started.
Aim & Ignite is everything I could want from a rock band in the 21st Century. Confessional lyrics that can bring me to tears, grandiose scope, influenced by Queen and ELO as well as a host of others, and never once sounding like a 2nd rate version of any of them.
Aim opens in similar fashion as Dog Problems. With a overture of sorts. The french cafe sounds of "Be Calm" serves another purpose besides the orchestral arrangements of horns and strings. It's alien. It's unfamiliar. It's foreign.
And that's the topic of the song. Nate moved (away from his band and his mom) from Arizona to the musical hotbed of creativity that is Brooklyn. And with that move he hooked up with instrumentalist Andrew Dost and Guitarist (and leader of the stellar rock outfit from New Jersey) Jack Antonoff. And the three of them created an indie-rock super group.
Opening the album with something as different, progressive, poppy, operatic and exciting as "Be Calm" suggests that Aim and Ignite will be less a standard issue, next phase of a career and more of group putting it all on the table because, hell, it probably won't work anyway.
The next track, "Benson Hedges" could have been the next stage that I was talking about. It very easily could have been on (and I believe might have been written for) The Format's 3rd record that never happened.
Doesn't matter. It's great. That song and the brilliant summer single, "All the Pretty Girls", proves that it was Nate all along that was driving The Format. It would be one thing to resurrect one's self with a new band and say, "This is what I am doing now. Deal with it. Follow or don't." But, Nate doesn't do that. Whether by design or not, what he's done is create a perfect album to bring Format fans to, keep THEM engaged and reach out to a larger audience by expanding the palette.
At the end of all this (and everything is a gas, from the mariachi-swing of "At Least I'm Not as Sad" to the lower east side indie rock of "Walking the Dog" to the built in audience riser showstopper "Barlights" with its city horns and gospel chorus) there is "The Gambler". It's hard to explain my reaction to the first (and second and third....) time I heard this song. Written in the voice of his mother, the song is a love letter to his parents' relationship. With his father's near death (a familiar trope for Ruess fans) and their move to the desert ("to save our only son"), it's such a moving piece that I am reduced to tears every time I hear it. I just watched them live last weekend and...yep...tears.
Then I played the song in the car for my wife who wasn't familiar with the lyrics. She read along as it played and...yep...tears.
The album ends with a self reflective piece by Nate as he ponders the last few years of his life, the new friends, those who didn't believe in him in the first place. Musically, it's all over the map, borrowing from Vampire Weekend's Upper East Side Soweto among other sounds. It SHOULD be all over the map. Nate's been all over the country and landed in the biggest melting pot in America.
It's a wondrous thing when the template of a song echoes the sentiments behind the words.
I'm grateful to the guys at PopDose for not digging this album but thinking I would. Cuz they were right.
In every sense Aim & Ignite succeeds.
Grade: A+
ASide: Be Calm, Benson Hedges, All the Pretty Girls, The Gambler
BlindSide: I Wanna Be The One, At Least I'm Not as Sad (as I Used to Be), Barlights, Take Your Time (Coming Home)
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