Ben Folds Five reunite: an album review

There’s no rule that says lyrics have to make sense, rhyme or be singable.  But it sure doesn’t hurt.  On the first Ben Folds Five album in thirteen years, Folds pursues the lyrical trend he telegraphed in a 2008 Time Magazine interview:

I always want to push the barrier a little bit with lyrics. In songs we're supposed to say, "Girl, uh huh, you done me wrong, you did." But you've got to break out of that.

Break out of that he did, first with Nick Hornby providing the lyrical content for 2010’s Lonely Avenue, and now in The Sound of the Life of the Mind.  Although it’s the first album since 2005’s Songs for Silverman that sounds like it was recorded by a live band, the lack of lyrical flow and hooks keeps the long-awaited reunion from being a more celebrated event. 

When I see Ben Folds perform this Sunday night in Chicago, will anyone in the audience sing along to “Michael Praytor, Five Years Later”:

Good morning, mirror
Break the change to me
I tried to stay too close to see
That there's a pattern in the tiles
And a fool who marks the miles
It was long hair
And this time it was no hair

Poetic?  Debatable, I suppose, but not good lyric writing.  Even drummer Darren Jessee’s lyrical contribution to the album, “Sky High” has lines that are too complex for their own good.  This is rock and roll, after all. 

As for the music, by the time the last Ben Folds Five album was released in 1999, they’d already begun to abandon the sound of their first two releases: the slightly out-of-tune harmonies, the raw energy and edginess – these were smoothed out on The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner in a more finely-produced collection, so much so that I thought it would be their break-through album, the radio-friendly release that finally finds mass appeal.  It didn’t, but the smoother production remains thirteen years later, making this collaboration sound more like another Ben Folds solo album than a reunion of an old band.  I suspect that live performances of these tracks will invite an edginess on stage that wasn’t captured in the studio.

All three musicians are highly skilled, and Ben Folds is still an insanely talented and smart guy, so the album has its moments.  The opening track, “Erase Me” offers tight Queen-like harmonies (and a line that Folds’s four ex-wives must find either amusing or infuriating: New bio, you’ve gone solo, drawing mustaches on our wedding photo), the distorted bass of Robert Sledge is great to hear again, and Sara without an H is back (on the title track penned by Nick Hornby), this time fleeing her pedestrian friends in favor of going to school to pursue knowledge and beauty.  Coming closest to the signature Ben Fold Five sound is “Draw a Crowd,” which offers one of the few hooks on the album:

Oh, if you’re feeling small, and you can’t draw a crowd
Draw dicks on a wall

The best tune on the album, “Do it anyway,” finally has a lyric that makes sense along with a tight rockabilly pattern reminiscent of the Old 97s. 

So tell me what I said I’d never do
Tell me what I said I’d never say
Read me off a list of the things I used to not like but now I think are OK

On “Away When You Were Here,” Folds sings about a father who died when the narrator was still a boy, and imagines what life would be like had he lived:

You’d have lost that weight
You’d have gone so straight
You’d have made my wedding day
You’d have saved my youth from that point of truth
You’d have kept those wolves at bay

It’s a well-executed lyric.  I wish there were more of these on the album.

Rush Mixes it Up (to a point)

I imagine that being in a band with twenty albums of material is burdensome at times.  With that much history behind you, pleasing all of your fans while attempting to please yourself has got to be a daunting task.  For years, Rush has fallen into the routine of playing whatever album they’re promoting, along with what I like to call “the first song on the album syndrome.”  If they played an album from Signals, it was “Subdivisions.”  If they played a song from Power Windows, it was “The Big Money.”  Hold Your Fire?  “Force Ten.”  Roll the Bones?  "Dreamline."  It became very predictable, and I often wondered why they didn’t allow themselves to dig a little deeper into their extensive repertoire.

On Saturday at the United Center in Chicago, Rush mixed things up to a degree that undoubtedly left some people beside themselves with joy and others scratching their heads at yet another missed opportunity.  I was somewhere in the middle, but ultimately I have to applaud Rush for finally shaking the dust off of some tunes that hadn’t seen a live performance in over a decade.  Rush has always thrown a surprise or two in their setlist – “Presto” on the Time Machine tour, “Between the Wheels” on the R30 tour, “Circumstances” on the Snakes and Arrows tour – but this time around they performed at least six unexpected tracks.

If you liked 80s Rush – not their crowning back-to-back albums Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures – but from the subsequent synth-heavy releases, you were a happy camper.

Kicking off the 2 ½ hour show with “Subdivisions,” Rush didn’t leave the 80s until the 8^th track, and not before surprising the audience with two songs I’d been hoping to hear for the past twenty years: “The Body Electric” from Grace Under Pressure, and “Territories” from Power Windows.  In fact, PW won the contest for most songs (aside from Rush’s new release, Clockwork Angels).  Who would have figured that one?  “Analog Kid” from Signals was another great addition and a crowd favorite.  Less effective was “Grand Designs” from PW, and why the rock trio can’t perform something other than “Force Ten” from Hold Your Fire is a mystery.  It’s never been a showstopper, so why continue to grind through yet another performance of a tired song?

Geddy Lee was in fine form on Saturday, his voice as strong as it’s been in years, hitting the higher register on most songs – especially those from Clockwork Angels – consistently.  Sure, he can’t sing “Temples of Syrinx,” but who can?  Geddy couldn’t even hit those notes twenty years ago.  Neil Peart made the wise choice of performing three mini drum solos this time out rather than one extensive solo.  The result was an effective interlude between songs, rather than an extended piece that – to my ears at least – had sometimes grown tiresome.  Especially effective was Neil’s electronic solo prior to “Red Sector A” (yet another surpriing choice).

Still early on their US tour, Alex occasional forgot to lip-synch the prerecorded vocal tracks he’s supposed to pretend he’s actually singing, but the result was the same.  He also forgot to press his acoustic simulator at the beginning of “The Garden,” so the first two or three chords came blazing out of his guitar before he recognized his mistake.  Still, he and his bandmates were – as always – masterful at their instruments and a pleasure to watch.

Equally masterful was the addition of a seven-piece string section that accompanied the band throughout the Clockwork Angels selections as well as three other songs.  The highlight for me, aside from a beautifully pulsating introduction of the “The Garden,” was the addition of strings on “YYZ,” in which they doubled the guitar parts at key moments, lifting an already unbelievable song to new heights.

Some of the new material went over very well.  “Caravan” has already become a fan favorite after its introduction during the Time Machine tour, and the driving “Headlong Flight” electrified the audience.  Other songs went over less enthusiastically, and it wasn’t hard to conclude that Rush probably played two new songs too many.  Nine was a lot to digest.

Ending the set with the typical trio of “The Spirit of Radio,” “Tom Sawyer” and a medley of selections from “2112,” Rush left the audience on a high note.  But it’s easy to understand some of the disappointing posts I’ve read on-line.  Of Rush’s twenty albums, ten had no representation whatsoever.  Furthermore, they performed only one song from the 70s, (2112), one song from Permanent Waves (The Spirit of Radio) and two songs from Moving Pictures (Tom Sawyer and YYZ).  It would have been nice to have heard “Free Will,” “Limelight,” “La Villa Strangiato” or a track off of Presto (“Superconductor,” anyone?).

Nonetheless, my son, my brother and I left the show happy to have heard a great band playing at a high level after all these years.  In fact, I attended my first legitimate concert with my brother back on October 9, 1982, when we saw Rush perform at MECCA in Milwaukee.  The Brewers were in the World Series, and Geddy and Neil both came out sporting Brewer garb during the opening number of “The Spirit of Radio.”  When Geddy was supposed to sing, “one likes to believe in the spirit of music,” he substituted “music” with “baseball.”  A more auspicious introduction to concert viewing in the eyes of a fourteen year-old boy there has never been. 

Now, almost exactly thirty years later, and I saw Rush with my ten year-old son.  How cool is that?  And who the heck would have thought back in 1982 that the Canadian trio would still be pumping out solid material to well-attended concerts?

Arbitrage: movie review

I remember almost nothing about business school, but I remember this: arbitrage is the exploitation of inconsistencies in the market.  In debut director Nicholas Jarecki’s “Arbitrage,” Richard Gere looks to exploit not only his business dealings, which are quickly crumbling, but his personal life, which isn’t much better.  Half the fun is watching to see if he can pull it off.

Gere is a hedge-fund billionaire attempting to sell his business for reasons that don’t make sense to his daughter and CFO, Brit Marling, but we soon learn what Brit doesn’t: Gere’s company is cash poor, and he’s cooked the books so that it can pass muster with a prospective buyer.  The screws are turning from all sides: a friend who loaned him hundreds of millions wants payback, mistress (Laetitia Casta) demands more of him than he can provide, and the auditors are dragging their feet.

And then things really start to go bad.

To divulge more would be unwise, but suffice it to say that what ensues will require an investigation by the incomparable Tim Roth, a showdown with wife Susan Sarandon, and several pleadings from attorney Stuart Margolin to confess before things get worse.  Margolin (Angel from “The Rockford Files”) was particularly fun to see after all these years.

“Arbitrage” could just as easily be called “The Ides of March 2,” as it shares not only the same cynicism portrayed in the Oscar-nominated movie of last year – in which human beings are little more than moveable parts – but also the fall off a naiveté’s pedestal.  Both films are expertly-done thrillers, and both feature a seasoned veteran whose character attempts to juggle all the pieces before they crash as headlines and prison terms.

I hadn’t heard a word about Arbitrage until yesterday morning, but the theater I attended on Friday night was packed (at $10.50 a ticket!), indicating that adults are starved for entertainment and are willing to shell out cash for grown-up entertainment.  Hollywood take notice.

Rains Don't Detract at Wrigley: Springsteen's Second Night

You gotta hand it to Springsteen.  A few years ago when I was asked why I think so highly of the aging rocker, I said, “Because he pores every ounce of his being into every performance.”  Saturday night’s show at Wrigley Field was no exception, as Springsteen and his ever-growing E Street Band withstood the elements – namely, a steady rain for much of the show – to lead 40,000 fans in song for close to three hours.  At sixty-three, The Boss has lost none of the energy he possessed when I attended his concert at Alpine Valley in 1984, and it begs the question: if a 63 year-old guy can still put this much exuberance into a show, why do so many other performers phone it in?

In addition to high energy, the other element Springsteen brings to a show is surprise.  Of the 27 songs performed on Saturday night, fourteen hadn’t been performed the night prior.  So sure, I wish he’d performed “Atlantic City” and “The River,” but instead I got “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” “The Ties that Bind,” an unexpected “Because the Night,” and an even more unexpected “Rosalita,” which was presented almost as a gift for the die-hard fans who by that point were as drenched as Springsteen himself.  So who could complain?

Wrigley is a terrible place to see a concert, but that was to be expected; visual obstructions, an overpacked concourse and lines to the bathrooms are part of the drill at the century-old ballpark.  My daughter and I sat about ten rows behind a pole in section 239, but we were especially pleased to learn that despite no shelter overhead, the rain left our area dry and landed about five seats to our right. 

For the hard-core fans on the field, there was no escaping the elements.  Many had brought ponchos, but most just continued to dance and cheer and sing in unison to Springsteen’s repertoire.  The rain prompted Springsteen to play an acoustic version of CCR’s “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” but it wasn’t answered until a half hour after the show.  Aside from the main console, which was sheltered under a tent, nothing else was protected, and it left me wondering about the condition of Steve Van Zandt’s guitar and Soozie Tyrell’s violin.

The new tracks from Wrecking Ball, when interspersed throughout a long set, played better than they do on the album.  “We Take Care of our Own” sounded powerful and fit in seamlessly on the heels of “Hungry Heart,” and “Wrecking Ball” and “Death to my Hometown” worked well despite their repetitiveness.  One of the evenings highlights was “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” a raucous, balls-to-the-wall version with a spastic guitar solo by Tom Morello that left the crowd erupting.  Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder returned for the second Wrigley show, adding effective vocals to "My Hometown" and "Darkness."

After Clarence Clemons died last year, I wondered if Bruce would continue to play "Tenth Avenue Freeze Out," and was pleased to hear the song's return with a newly added pause after the line "the big man joined the band," during which a minute-long photo montage of Clemons appeared on the video screens.  It was a nice touch, and a moving one that drew applause from those in attendance. 

After the last chord of "Americanland," my daughter and I could see the various band members walk behind the stage toward the ballpark exit.  Springsteen, rather than running out as quickly as he could, spent several minutes backstage before making his way toward the right-field corner of the outfield, where he pumped his fists in appreciation for an audience who toughed it out.

I was sixteen when I first saw Springsteen, and if you had told me then that I’d one day attend another show of his with my fifteen year-old daughter, I’d have flipped.

How cool is that to share a little bit of my past with a big part of my present?

Simplicity to a Fault: Springsteen's Wrecking Ball

Some of the greatest rock and roll songs ever have also been the simplest.  Whether you’re a fan of Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly, The Clash and The Ramones or Green Day and Nirvana, sometimes the simplest songs capture emotions with a charge unattainable by more complex arrangements.  Are you telling me that “Baba O’Riley” doesn’t still give you chills?  Come on.

In two weeks, I’m attending my first Bruce Springsteen show in thirteen years, this time with my fifteen year-old daughter.  In preparation, I thought it made sense to purchase The Boss’s latest effort, Wrecking Ball, but while digesting the material over the past few months, I keep coming to the same conclusion: the album is simplistic to a fault.  There isn’t a chord or a note on the entire album that surprises me, that gives me pause or a reason to take notice.  By track six, I’m so bored, I inevitably turn it off and wait to digest the final five songs at a later listening session.

To confirm my instincts, I tracked the chord changes of each song on the eleven-track album.  Here are the results:

• Every song is in a major key.
• Not one song changes key.
• Every song but one is in 4/4, with an occasional 2/4 measure thrown in.
• On the entire album, there are a total of five chords, with an occasional altered root note: I, IV, V, vi minor and ii minor.  That’s it.   And the ii minor chord only appears on one song, so 10 songs have at most four chords in them.

Now, I’m not dissing simplicity.  Give me a good Johnny Cash album or Green Day album or classic Stones album, and I’m a happy guy.  But Springsteen’s latest album is nothing short of a bore.  Just as Yes and Genesis became too complex for their own good in the 1970s, Springsteen has become so simple that there isn’t any reason for listeners to care.

One could counter my conclusion by saying that Springsteen has always been simple, so why start complaining now?

But it wasn’t always this way.

Take a song like “Hungry Heart.”  Simple?  Yes.  But what really makes the song work is the unexpected key change leading into the organ solo, and then changing keys again for the final verse.  Nothing fancy, but just enough alteration to make the listener take notice.  The song “Born to Run” is also a relatively simply song (though the chorus alone contains more chords than the entire Wrecking Ball album), but what really lifts the song from good to great is the interlude that contains an odd key change, a chromatic descension and a four measure pause before resolving back to the one chord in an achingly satisfying way.

So much of Springsteen’s new album could have benefitted from a bridge with a different chord, a key change, a pause, a tempo or meter change, a something.  Tracks like “Wrecking Ball,” “Shackled and Drawn,” “We Take Care of our Own” are fine for a while, but listen to them successively and sleepiness sets in.

I’ve no doubt that hearing “Death to my Hometown” or “Easy Money” will be great fun when shared with 40,000 fans come September 8^th, but I’m afraid that after the Wrigley Field concert, Wrecking Ball will no longer make it into my regular rotation. 

(I should note that “Land of Hope and Dreams,” which appears in studio form for the first time on this album, is on par with Springsteen’s greatest songs ever.  As I said, sometimes simple is good.)