It will come as no surprise to longtime readers of the Daily Vault -- not to mention my wonderful, long-suffering spouse -- that I can be a moron sometimes. Case in point: I didn't pick up Ben Folds' 2001 disc Rockin' The Suburbs until earlier this year.
I've been a Folds fan since the first time I heard "Brick," the achingly beautiful crisis-and-aftermath ballad off the Ben Folds Five's Whatever And Ever Amen album. After the Five's third disc appeared in 1999, however, Folds more or less simultaneously dissolved the group, got married and moved to Australia.
Rockin' The Suburbs is therefore Folds' unofficial solo
debut (although his 1998 side project, Fear Of Pop, was basically a
solo album). And as much as I enjoyed the frenetic energy that the
Five's Robert Sledge-Darren Jessee rhythm section brought to the
music, I can't imagine Ben Folds making a better album at this
point in his career than
RTS. With all due respect to Joe Jackson and Randy Newman --
clearly both influences of Folds' -- there hasn't been album of
piano-based rock this good since Elton John's early '70s
heyday.
Rippling melodies and sharp-eyed lyrical detail populate this album with hummable, memorable cuts. Folds' piano playing is so instinctively rhythmic on tracks like "Annie Waits" and "Fired" that it makes me want to go back even farther and invoke the name of the Great One, Jerry Lee Lewis. Yet he also pulls off restrained and gorgeous on ballads like "Still Fighting It" and the soaring, touching "The Luckiest." And superbly arranged harmonies? Let's just say Brian Wilson would be very proud of "Zak And Sara."
But really, the achievement of this album lies in the unique perspective and fully-realized characters of tracks like "Fred Jones Part 2" -- about a retiring newspaperman's last day -- and "The Ascent Of Stan " -- about a "textbook hippy man" who's mainstreamed with age and "become all those things you've always run from." These are full-blown character sketches that draw you in and show you the world from a new angle... quality writing, set to superb music.
Folds -- who's played piano, bass and drums in previous bands -- plays all three here, bringing in no more than a handful of studio musicians to help out on a few cuts. One of these is the one place where Folds really cuts loose with his jabbing sense of humor -- the title track, a brilliant and brutal deconstruction of angry suburban white-boy metalheads everywhere. Here Folds ditches the piano and lays on the guitars, but they're all for effect, and arranged to snarky perfection.
One other note. Next to waiting so long to buy the album in the first place, my biggest mistake was playing it for my 16-year-old son after I'd only listened to it once myself. After a single spin he enthusiastically "borrowed" it, and I didn't hear it again -- other than brief snatches while riding in his car -- for almost three months.
The moral of the story? Don't be a moron -- buy this album. And then don't let it out of your sight.