Published on Mar 5, 1998
These guys have got balls. That’s pretty much the first thing
you have to concede about a rock trio with no guitar player.
Ben Folds Five makes it work surprisingly well, though, with a
dynamic range of sounds — alternately hyperactive and restrained
piano melodies, layered, inventive vocal arrangements, jazzy
drumming and an amped, often heavily fuzzed bass guitar that’s
sometimes playing rhythm and sometimes surging into the lead.
Ben Folds (lead vocals, piano), Robert Sledge (bass, background
vocals) and Darren Jessee (drums, background vocals) are the three
who make up the Five, an in-your-face pun that nicely sums up the
band’s sarcastic bravado. It’s an attitude that weaves through this
wildly varied set of sad, furious, blissed-out, and sometimes loopy
tunes. Imagine a band that could channel Cole Porter, Jerry Lee
Lewis, Joe Jackson and Paul McCartney on successive songs — and
sometimes all at once — and you’re in the neighborhood.
The North Carolina group’s sophomore album,
Whatever And Ever Amen, has a loose sound that lets the
often complex arrangements breathe and swing. “One Angry Dwarf And
Two Hundred Solemn Faces” kicks things off with a cathartic
explosion of pent-up anger from a former schoolyard victim. Here,
as on each of the heavier tunes on the album, Folds pounds
furiously on the ivories without ever losing his melodic train of
thought.
“Fair,” like “Kate” later on, prominently features Sledge’s
fuzz-tone bass, distorted to the point where late in the song it
sounds almost like a tuba, beats functioning as musical exclamation
points to Folds’ ragtime-on-speed fingerwork on the keys. Third up
is the single that broke the band, “Brick,” a cool slice of
melancholy from Folds that’s rumored to be an autobiographical
piece about a girlfriend’s abortion and the shattering impact it
had on their relationship. The song draws its considerable power
from Folds’ skillful lyric and simple, honest delivery. When he
sings “She broke down / and I broke down / ‘Cause I was tired of
lying,” the total absence of melodrama in his voice makes the
emotional impact that much greater.
Just for the sake of brutal contrast, “Brick” segues right into
the ranting “Song For The Dumped.” A three-minute vent/spew that
alternates the girl/dumper’s series of limp break-up cliches with
the narrator/dumpee’s savage comebacks (this is NOT a G-rated
album…), it’s notable mostly for Folds’ rollicking, barrelhouse
piano-playing (although you’ve got to wonder if Jessee, who’s
credited with the lyric, really told her off like this or just
slunk back to the studio and let it all out on paper).
There’s much more, of course — a faux-urbane blistering of
sophisticated soullessness (“Selfless, Cold and Composed”) that
would be right at home on Joe Jackson’s
Night And Day album, a bubbly, frantic, power-poppish anthem
to a woman so wonderful dandelions bloom in her footsteps (“Kate”),
and the thundering return of Sledge’s fuzz-tone bass in “Battle Of
Who Could Care Less,” maybe the sharpest verbal surgery ever
performed on the tragically hip. (“Unearned unhappiness,”
indeed.)
The latter two songs are a perfect pair to represent the album’s
overall restless, moody feel. Folds is all over the map here —
from starry-eyed to disdainful, from single mikes to three-part
harmonies. What holds the album together is his no-frills delivery
and the essential rawness of the songs, whatever the emotion
they’re putting across. It’s honest music, delivered with evident
skill but virtually no pretension. In other words, ballsy to the
core.