The first Ben Folds Five album in 13 years sounds pretty much like they’ve never been away. Toe-tapping piano tinkering: check. Catchy choruses: indeed. Quirky melodies and notable lyrics? Yes and yes again. The same but, it has to be said, better.
The three-piece (Folds on piano and vocals, Darren Jessee on drums and Robert Sledge on bass) went their separate ways after 1999’s The Unauthorized Biography Of Reinhold Messner; 2011 saw them reunite on three new tracks for a Best Of compilation, which went so well that they decided to get the old band together again.
Folds himself is now 45 and his songwriting has achieved a maturity that was arguably missing from much of their early output. Take album opener, ‘Erase Me’: one of the most sonically ambitious songs Folds has ever attempted, it morphs from cacophonic, distorted stomper to iPhones-in-the-air ballad in a blink. Folds himself has said he wanted the track to sound like Britney Spears’ ‘Piece Of Me’, and despite the fact that he’s probably taking the piss, the description is apt, in the sense that there’s a big, ballsy, air-punching chorus, complete with booming percussion, that wouldn’t be out of place alongside Ms Spears on daytime radio.
Elsewhere, the OTT title track features Nick Hornby lyrics set to music (the author previously collaborated with Folds on 2010’s Lonely Avenue); ‘On Being Frank’ drips melancholy with every sweet chord, and lead single, ‘Do It Anyway’, is a blistering cow-punk call to arms, whose video sees Folds preaching positivity alongside the cast of Fraggle Rock for the best four-minute sermon you’re likely to hear this year. On the flip-side, the rabble-rousing ‘Draw A Crowd’ proves that, despite his advancing years, Folds isn’t beyond puerile when the mood takes him: “If you’re feeling small and you can’t draw a crowd, draw dicks on a wall.”
Despite that rather asinine assertion, The Sound... finishes with a triumvirate of top tunesmithery in the shape of the beautifully bittersweet, Simon & Garfunkel-like ‘Hold That Thought’, the sweeping, string-drenched ‘Away When You Were Here’ and the delicate waltz of ‘Thank You For Breaking My Heart’, like Disney without the syrupy sweetness. There’s meat on these here musical bones, as Ben Folds Five add depth and substance to the quirk and catchiness that came before. Welcome back, gentlemen.