It will come as no surprise to longtime readers of the Daily
\nVault — not to mention my wonderful, long-suffering spouse — that
\nI can be a moron sometimes. Case in point: I didn’t pick up Ben
\nFolds’ 2001 disc
\nRockin’ The Suburbs<\/i> until earlier this year.<\/p>\n
I’ve been a Folds fan since the first time I heard “Brick,” the
\nachingly beautiful crisis-and-aftermath ballad off the Ben Folds
\nFive’s
\nWhatever And Ever Amen<\/i> album. After the Five’s third disc
\nappeared in 1999, however, Folds more or less simultaneously
\ndissolved the group, got married and moved to Australia.<\/p>\n
\nRockin’ The Suburbs<\/i> is therefore Folds’ unofficial solo
\ndebut (although his 1998 side project, Fear Of Pop, was basically a
\nsolo album). And as much as I enjoyed the frenetic energy that the
\nFive’s Robert Sledge-Darren Jessee rhythm section brought to the
\nmusic, I can’t imagine Ben Folds making a better album at this
\npoint in his career than
\nRTS<\/i>. With all due respect to Joe Jackson and Randy Newman —
\nclearly both influences of Folds’ — there hasn’t been album of
\npiano-based rock this good since Elton John’s early ’70s
\nheyday.<\/p>\n
Rippling melodies and sharp-eyed lyrical detail populate this
\nalbum with hummable, memorable cuts. Folds’ piano playing is so
\ninstinctively rhythmic on tracks like “Annie Waits” and “Fired”
\nthat it makes me want to go back even farther and invoke the name
\nof the Great One, Jerry Lee Lewis. Yet he also pulls off restrained
\nand gorgeous on ballads like “Still Fighting It” and the soaring,
\ntouching “The Luckiest.” And superbly arranged harmonies? Let’s
\njust say Brian Wilson would be very proud of “Zak And Sara.”<\/p>\n
But really, the achievement of this album lies in the unique
\nperspective and fully-realized characters of tracks like “Fred
\nJones Part 2” — about a retiring newspaperman’s last day — and
\n“The Ascent Of Stan ” — about a “textbook hippy man” who’s
\nmainstreamed with age and “become all those things you’ve always
\nrun from.” These are full-blown character sketches that draw you in
\nand show you the world from a new angle… quality writing, set to
\nsuperb music.<\/p>\n
Folds — who’s played piano, bass and drums in previous bands —
\nplays all three here, bringing in no more than a handful of studio
\nmusicians to help out on a few cuts. One of these is the one place
\nwhere Folds really cuts loose with his jabbing sense of humor —
\nthe title track, a brilliant and brutal deconstruction of angry
\nsuburban white-boy metalheads everywhere. Here Folds ditches the
\npiano and lays on the guitars, but they’re all for effect, and
\narranged to snarky perfection.<\/p>\n
One other note. Next to waiting so long to buy the album in the
\nfirst place, my biggest mistake was playing it for my 16-year-old
\nson after I’d only listened to it once myself. After a single spin
\nhe enthusiastically “borrowed” it, and I didn’t hear it again —
\nother than brief snatches while riding in his car — for almost
\nthree months.<\/p>\n
The moral of the story? Don’t be a moron — buy this album. And
\nthen don’t let it out of your sight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":26689,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[7015],"rating":[5646],"class_list":["post-37944","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-ben-folds","rating-rating-a"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/37944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/37944\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37944"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=37944"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=37944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}