Before I get to my opinion of 42-year-old pianopop legend Ben Folds' new album WAY TO NORMAL, I'll yield the floor to a few opinions from the commenters at THE ONION's AV CLUB (where the album received a C+):
To me it [Folds' previous album SONGS FOR SILVERMAN] felt way too much like he was getting very middle-aged. The whole album seemed like something I'd find on adult contemporary radio and compared to his early work, well... that's just sad.
I felt that BF5 went downhill with each album and, while great when I heard the tracks played live, Messner was overproduced, scattershot, and not terribly good. With "Rockin' The Suburbs", however, he was completely back and reinvigorated, but then it just fell apart with Silverman.
So far I haven't heard anything on this album that sounds that good. It looks like he's just getting weaker and blander. Where's the great stuff we know he's capable of, like the wonderful cover of "Such Great Heights"? He can lend real passion and fun to songs, but his recent albums have just been so... bland, dry, and melancholy.
I'm more than a little surprised that there is so much love out there for Songs For Silverman. I'll take the aggressive, wacky side of Ben Folds over the drippy sentimental side any day of the week.
Put me in with the crowd that says "Songs for Silverman" had five-or-so great tracks and the rest was utterly forgettable. If the same goes for this new one, I'll be happy enough. The songs from "Normal" I heard him preview in concert were memorable, but they also seemed too bitter ... even coming from the man who wrote "Song for the Dumped." I'm real sorry his marriage [Folds' third--to Australian Frally Hines, with which he had a son and daughter; Folds remarried for the fourth time last year] ended in a big meltdown, but I kind of wish he wasn't dealing with it quite so publicly ... or at least with a bit more subtlety.
Now it's my turn. Around 1997, I first heard of Ben Folds and the late lamented band Ben Folds Five by way of a British music magazine which drew parallels between Folds and Joe Jackson. I bought the Five's breakout album WHATEVER AND EVER AGAIN and found it good but not great. Since then, I've caught up with most of the remainder of the Folds catalog (and have seen him live three times--with the Five and as a "solo" act) and find that his two masterpieces are the first, self-titled Ben Folds Five album and his first post-Five album ROCKIN' THE SUBURBS (which had the misfortune of being released on 9/11./2001); a runner-up would be his post-SUBURBS EPs, which were compiled into a slightly altered collection called SUPERSUNNYSPEEDGRAPHIC.
Ben Folds, much like Nick Lowe (who reinvented himself in recent years as a snoozy balladeer), tends to stumble when reaching for Art. Folds got away with the 60s pop pastiches on RHEINHOLD MESSNER, but it was clear that being a chronicler of his generation--particularly on the first Five album--became something he wanted to distance himself from (his mostly-instrumental FEAR OF POP side project during the Five years did have a sort of "look, I'm a virtuouso who can play more instruments than you and I'm tired of writing four-minute pop songs" fragrance). After MESSNER's relative disappointment, Folds returned to the funny-and-sometimes-poignant third-person narratives he does best on ROCKIN' THE SUBURBS. Then Art reared its head again, and the too-subdued SONGS FOR SILVERMAN (the best songs of which would make a decent EP) appeared three years ago--and the press for the album strongly indicated that Folds was putting childish things away for good.
And now, here's the relatively energetic WAY TO NORMAL--which opens with "Hiroshima", an entertaining Elton John homage about an accident at a Folds concert in Japan (with a doll-populated video). But it says something that two of the best songs--"Free Coffee" (Folds talking about his wealth and the perks thereof) and "Errant Dog" (a sort of canine version of Warren Zevon's "Gorilla, You're a Desperado") would have been either B-sides or throwaways on earlier albums. The actual songs that sort-of-reference the divorce from Frally Hines indicate that Folds, now 42 years old, is capable of anger and feelings of being unjustly maligned (there's a line in one song about how people who take his ex's side are projecting issues of their own onto him) but not quite ready for the introspection one might have at that age--almost a year into a fourth marriage.
To close, I'll just say that Ben Folds is more wise and thoughtful (even profound) when he's being a wiseacre--much like Nick Lowe. Too much taste (or, in the case of WAY TO NORMAL, too much aggrieved tsuris) doesn't become Folds at all in the artistic sense.
Here's the ONION review, plus the full pro-and-con range of comments: http://www.avclub.com/content/music/ben_folds
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