Oct. 10, 2012 - Issue #886: Typhoon Judy
The Sound of the Life of the Mind
Ben Folds Five {recordings_bands_mg} The Sound of the Life of the Mind {/recordings_bands_mg}
ImaVeePee,
3
The three members of the Ben Folds Five went their separate ways back in 2000, and this casually made return album—developed without a label, written and recorded in bits and pieces whenever the three of them could find time to meet in the studio—has the feeling of a really good one-off reunion jam, successful in finding the old energy that propelled them in their heyday without seeking to change any of it.So if The Sound of the Life of the Mind sounds like the Ben Folds Five has always sounded, that doesn't mean the band's chasing a past, fleeting glory. It's just three capable musicians revisiting a good thing they used to do together. Here the aggression's a little tempered maybe, the snark turned down perhaps, but the decade-long gap has had little noticable impact on the sounds the trio makes together. Fold's solo offerings have drawn from broader musical palates than the purposefully restrained piano-fuzz bass-drums combo present here (the occasional string flourish backs up some of the ballads), while his lyrics run from gorgeous to silly—"If you can't draw a crowd / Draw dicks on the wall" goes the refrain on "Draw a Crowd"—all of it delivered with crisp production value.
The Sound of the Life of the Mind is casual, but that isn't to say it's lazy: it's just happening just 'cause. The Five isn't reinventing itself, or really altering the course it was on more than a decade ago. It sounds like the Five just wanted to write something together again, and in that, Life of the Mind expands the great Ben Folds Five songbook mostly just in volume: in place of new directions, there's simply a renewal of a comfortable energy. Here, that's more than good enough.
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