Ben Folds' new disc, Rockin' the Suburbs (Epic Records), is the best piano-based rock record since Little Richard found Jesus and Jerry Lee Lewis married his first cousin. To be fair, the list of possible suspects isn't a long one, and I'm disqualifying Billy Joel and Elton John on principle: Both of 'em cheated and used guitar players when they wanted to rawk out: Yes, boys and girls, there once was a time when Elton John rawked out. So my declaration carries about as much weight as Jean-Claude Van Damme being the best kickboxer in Belgium. But no matter. Folds' first solo album after the 1999 breakup of Chapel Hill's Ben Folds Five - psst: there were only three of them - rocks because of, and in spite of, its instrumentation.
Suburbs travels much of the same musical ground as BF5's three studio albums, but it does so with more panache, more focus and perhaps, most importantly, more piano. Folds played almost all of the album's instruments himself, and while subdued strings, the best kind , do pop up on a few tracks, the over-orchestration that plagued the last BF5 album (1999's Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner) is thankfully absent. One of Beck's homies supplies "beats" on a few songs, but they sound to me suspiciously like the ones preprogrammed on those little Casio keyboards.
Gone, too, is much of the self-conscious, smirking irony of the Five - with one exception, which I'll get to in a minute. For the most part, Suburbs shies away from the navel-gazing of BF5 tracks like "Army" and "Underground" in favor of more restrained, sharply observed character studies - think "Brick," tellingly, the Five's biggest hit. But the album's real triumph is its tunefulness, suggesting contemporaries such as Elliott Smith as well as antecedents like the Beach Boys and Simon and Garfunkel. And, yes, Jerry Lee Lewis, the last significant rock 'n' roller to play his piano, as Folds does, like an electric guitar.
The album kicks off with "Annie Waits," a slick, '80s-ish pop number pushed along by those aforementioned "beats," in which a girl waits ambiguously "for a call from a friend." As "the clock never stops," she agonizes in classic Folds style: "He forgot, he forgot, maybe not. Maybe he's been seriously hurt. Would that be worse?" The Beatle-esque "Zak and Sara" tells the story of a mid-'80s girl who, while watching her boyfriend show off in a guitar store, envisions the rave scene to come; "She saw the lights, she saw the pale English face/Some strange machines repeating beats and thumping bass". "Gone," lyrically a mellower take on the BF5 hit "Song for the Dumped," pulls off a convincing, guitarless Weezer imitation, while "Fred Jones, Part II" is the album's strongest ballad, a tribute to an aging newspaperman on his last day at work. And if there is any justice in this world, "Still Fighting It" will one day replace Harry Chapin's "Cat's in the Cradle" as the father-to-son-confessional of choice. What's not to like about a song that begins, "Good morning, son. I am a bird wearing a brown polyester shirt. You want a Coke? Maybe some fries?"
Like Kevin Spacey as the suburban dad in American Beauty, Suburbs begins to drag a bit at the halfway point. "The Ascent of Stan" manages the same delicacy with rippling piano that is Elliott Smith's forte with rippling guitar, but its tale of a former hippie who's become everything he hated seems shallow and clichd after the pathos of "Fred Jones." "Losing Lisa" takes its cue from "Good Vibrations"-era Beach Boys; "Carrying Cathy" owes a strong debt to Simon and Garfunkel (literally and figuratively - the intro is filched from S and G's "April Come She Will").
In the infinite wisdom of major labels, the album's weakest song is both its title track and its first single. "Rockin' the Suburbs," the song, rewrites the Five's indie-rock-skewering debut single "Underground" as a swipe at the current generation of rap-rock bands. Here as nowhere else on the album, Folds' look-at-me-I'm-clever side rears its ugly head, and the results are both lyrically and musically unpleasant: "I got shit runnin' through my brain/It's so intense that I can't explain/All alone in my white boy pain." Sliding along on a workable enough post-Chili Peppers groove, Folds forgets the first two lessons in Musical Satire 101: First, work in the genre you're making fun of, and second, be funny - and to top it all off, there's no piano on it! Regrettably, given the way radio works these days, this one misstep may spell commercial doom for the album: The song isn't getting much radio play, and our "TRL" world doesn't allow much room for second chances. Damn shame, too. Ben Folds, his piano and this record deserve to rock not only the suburbs but the world at large.
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