Drops: fun.'s ambitious 'Some Nights' CD

The opening of fun.'s "Some Nights" (Fueled by Ramen) is so brazenly ambitious, you can't help but expect the New York trio to eventually fall flat on their faces. Spoiler alert: They don't.

"Some Nights Intro" starts with Nate Ruess' distinctive voice and a simple piano line that builds into operatic grandeur, calling to mind both Queen and Rufus Wainwright as the former Format front man declares, "Tea parties and Twitter, I've never been so bitter." "Some Nights" conjures up Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk" and Paul Simon's "Graceland" while Ruess goes through an existential musical crisis, wondering "What do I stand for? Most nights, I don't know."

They follow that with "We Are Young," an iTunes smash already featured on "Glee" and car commercials that will soon take root at a pop radio station near you. Like many of fun.'s songs, "We Are Young" is a massive stadium-ready anthem about something very small -- in this case, a night at the bar. It crystallizes what fun. does extraordinarily well, taking the familiar and -- with the aid of producer Jeff Bhasker, who helped Kanye West achieve something similarly ambitious -- giving it their own modernized twist.

Even when they strip back their ambitions on "Why Am I the One," fun. still manages to make the chorus sound enormous. "Some Nights" is a prime example of how "fake it til you make it" works. No worries, their sales will soon be as huge as their sound.

FUN.

"Some Nights"

GRADE A

BOTTOM LINE Gorgeous little stories that sound enormous