BEN FOLDS: LONELY AVENUE (2010)
1) A Working Day; 2) Picture
Window; 3) Levi Johnston's Blues; 4) Doc Pomus; 5) Your Dogs; 6) Practical
Amanda; 7) Claire's Ninth; 8) Password; 9) From Above; 10) Saskia Hamilton; 11)
Belinda.
"Some guy on the net thinks I suck and he
should know / He's got his own blog". Do you happen to have an idea whom
he is referring to? I mean, surely guys with blogs have so much more important
things to write about than whether or not Ben Folds sucks... oh wait a minute.
Actually, I really hate how he put that line in
the very first song on the album, because now I am confused and I do not
properly understand whether this album sucks because it sucks, or whether it
sucks because he just happened to piss off the reviewer right away. Well, okay,
maybe not «sucks» as such, but as Ben Folds grows older, it seems to be taking
more and more and more time to warm up to every next album, and time has just
went up from gold to platinum these days, so I will just say this: Lonely Avenue, the result of Ben's
productive collaboration with novelist Nick Hornby, is strictly one for the
fans, rather than for guys with blogs.
First of all, the idea of pulling the author of
About A Boy into the world of Ben
Folds seems about as strange an idea as, say, Bob Dylan's collaboration with
Jacques Levy on Desire — Folds may
not be an undeniably super-great lyricist, but there was never anything
particularly wrong with his lyrical expression, either, and if you weren't
informed, or an analytical expert on Folds' syntactic preferences, you might
not detect an «outsider»'s lyrical presence on here in the first place — we still
get the same old slices of everyday life dragged through the same impressionist
/ existentialist poetic filters. So it is really Nick Hornby complaining about
the anonymous blogger, but it could have easily been Ben himself. So it is Nick
who pokes fun at the name ʽSaskia Hamiltonʼ (I wonder if the real Saskia Hamilton, who had only just
won the Guggenheim Fellowship, took any offense?), but how would an idea like
that not be capable of being
generated in the already corrupt, degenerate, and deeply offensive brain of Ben
Folds?..
Although the point of this collaboration is
sort of obscure, in itself, this is certainly not a problem. The problem is
that the music seems to be lacking; even more than that, it seems to be
somewhat lifeless. Maybe, having agreed to write the music to a different
person's words, Ben was simply unable to find the right match. Maybe he wanted
to have himself an «Elton and Bernie» kind of an affair that was a long time
coming, but if so, he forgot that Elton never had any lyrical talent from the
very beginning, and that the whole «Elton and Bernie» thing started off and
developed as a coherent two-headed hybrid. Here, it's more like, «oh, another
batch of words, let me quickly generate some backing for it and get into
character».
Naturally, the overall sound is quintessential
Ben Folds — the poppy piano, the soft vocals, the harmony overdubs, the
occasional orchestration (and as if they needed yet another argument for my «Elton
and Bernie» theory, no less than Paul Buckmaster himself, Elton's old
orchestral guru, is credited for conducting and arranging strings). But most of
this stuff is very by-the-book Ben Folds — sentimental ballads that range from
weakly dynamic (ʽPicture Windowʼ, where string crescendos do help out some) to utterly
generic and forgettable (ʽClaire's Ninthʼ — generic hookless indie pap whose
dynamics, in contrast, only help it get more
mushy). Sometimes it even borders on atmospheric adult contemporary
(ʽPasswordʼ, whose words, or, rather, spellings
sound more interesting than the lazy music).
In the end, the only two good things on the
record are Buckmaster's orchestrations, which, amazingly, still sound inspiring after all those years (the album closer
ʽBelindaʼ almost justifies its personal-epic pretense because of those), and
ʽDoc Pomusʼ, a touching tribute to the man, one of whose songs gave name to the
entire album — although I would much rather hear Ben do a cover of ʽLonely
Avenueʼ than sing about half of these romantic puddles. In its defense, I can
only bring up the obvious — apart from the spoiled-brat pissed-off opener, Lonely Avenue is a kind, humanistic,
introspective, caressing work that will please the underdog and may offer some
light additional psychotherapy to fans of Badly Drawn Boy and the like. Unfortunately,
I happen to be pinching myself from
falling asleep — which, in this case, is sufficient reason for a thumbs down,
since it never happened before with any
other Ben Folds album so far.
Check "Lonely Avenue" (CD) on Amazon
Check "Lonely Avenue" (MP3) on Amazon
Yes it stinks, but then Hornby is involved so it's pretty much a no brainer that this would be the case. His taste in music is astoundingly bad.
ReplyDeletePicture Window, Doc Pomus and Belinda are the only tracks which don't make me yawn or need to stifle vomit, but I must admit I'm just about to log into my amazon seller account and ...there we go, anyone want a second hand copy of...
Wow -- I thought this was a terrific album, while I still hate Way To Normal.
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