Hey folks!

Today’s Best Album of 2001 match is:

#48 Ben Folds, ROCKIN' THE SUBURBS

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vs.

#81 The Langley Schools Music Project, INNOCENCE AND DESPAIR

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To vote, follow this link to the Google Form. You will need a Google login to vote. If you can’t or won’t have one, let me know ASAP (either through this newsletter, my email [kentmbeeson@hey.com] or on the Best Album Brackets Bluesky account) and I’ll see what I can do.

We have not one, not two, not three, but four Designated Cheerleader today. Three are for Ben Folds, and normally I’d hold off with two of those until Round 2, but we’ve already lost one 40-something seed to an 80-something seed; who’s to say it won’t happen again? So apologies for the length of this newsletter - it could get cut off.

Here’s DC #1, for ROCKIN’ THE SUBURBS, from @atcl.bsky.social. Take it away, All The City Lights!

My sense is that people have mostly made up their minds about Ben Folds. Anybody who is pretty sure that they’re just not going to enjoy “piano pop for the alternative nation” isn’t going to find anything on Rockin’ the Suburbs to change their mind. Anybody who is a fan of such things, they already count this among their all-time favorite albums. But maybe—maybe—dear reader, you are someone who heard “Brick” on the radio in 1997 and didn’t hate it but weren’t quite in the mood for a mournful ballad that day, and you haven’t given Folds another thought since. Perhaps you will be pleasantly surprised by the fast cascading arpeggios that open “Zak and Sara” and say to yourself, “Hold on, this kind of … rocks?”

Which is not to say that there are not mournful ballads on this album. There are. Several. Folds really doesn’t break any new ground on his solo debut, released two years after the breakup of Ben Folds Five. It’s still mostly piano, distorted bass, and drums. There is a sense of click-track precision and Pro Tools layering that you didn’t have when Robert Sledge and Darren Jessee were in the mix, which makes me wish this were the fourth Ben Folds Five album. But that is mitigated by the fact that this is one of the strongest collections of songs that Folds has ever penned.

Folds has always thrived doing sad-sack character studies. He outdoes himself here. Half the 12 tracks have names in the titles: Annie, Fred, Stan, Lisa, Cathy, Zak spelled without a C, Sara spelled without an H. They include lonelyhearts and suicides, forced-retiree cranks and sell-out boomers, douchey boyfriends and problematic girlfriends, including one who walks the line between clairvoyance and schizophrenia. Each one is a rich portrait, fully formed in under 5 minutes.

Let’s talk about the title track. It sticks out like a sore thumb. It is surely an effective satire of the aggro self-absorption of the era that gave us Limp Bizkit and Woodstock ’99. If these elements had come to confluence just a couple years later, Folds could have released it as a standalone iTunes single and maintained a much more consistent tone for the album. Alas.

The is the first appearance in the tournament of an album released on September 11 (there are four by my count?), and for me it was the soundtrack of those weeks following the attacks. I had been awaiting its release and had plans to go to Best Buy on my lunchbreak that Tuesday to buy a copy. My job as a reporter, even at a small-town paper, meant that I basically didn’t have a chance to breathe until Thursday evening, which is when I finally managed to pop the CD into my Discman. I sat on the banks of a river that marked the U.S.-Canadian border, listening to “Not the Same.” Even though it is admittedly a true-story song about a dude who got high at a party and became a born-again Christian, it seemed more profound in that moment. It still does.

Thank you, ATCL! Next up, it’s @msmucker.bsky.social for INNOCENCE AND DESPAIR. Since this one is in-depth, and care has been taken with the formatting, I’m going to reproduce it here as a series of images.

Thank you, Matthew!

Now, here’s the second DC for Ben Folds, this one by @mrfasthorse.bsky.social. Take it away, Mr. Fasthorse!

Fresh off the breakup of Ben Folds Five, the frontman produced a solo album with his "punk rock for sissies," pop piano supporting sometimes funny and often empathetic character sketches, with (occasionally distorted) bass guitar and drums handled by the man himself this time. The songs offer scenes of characters mixing larger anxieties into mundane suburban circumstances - will my boyfriend be home soon (and am I the object of unrequited love)? Can I afford this guitar amp (and is my girlfriend mentally unstable)? Do you want roast beef with fries (and was I wrong to bring another life into the world to suffer the pains of adolescence)? Do I want a cheeky tab of acid (and do I accept Jesus Christ my lord and savior)?

The album is a 60/40 mix of pop and ballads. Among the ballads Fred Jones Part 2 stands out, distilling the loneliness and sorrow baked into the forced retirement of a loyal company man, a returning character from a Ben Folds Five song. The Luckiest is a sweet meditation on the concept of soul mates, ironic for a guy who’d been twice divorced by 2001, and has tallied up two more since then. The pop songs are uptempo and catchy, with the clever melodies, soaring bridges, quippy lyrics, and piano fills that defined the niche the Five filled in pop rock in the late 90’s. The plucky bass and harmonies in the chorus of Losing Lisa to me have a little flavor of 70’s Paul McCartney, who is obviously a huge influence throughout Folds’ discography.

Not everything on the album ages perfectly 25 years on. Zak and Sara hits some now-overdone Manic Pixie Dreamgirl tropes (though at the time of its release Garden State wouldn’t come out for another 3 years). The title track itself is cringey if not problematic. A piano-based parody of Nu Metal isn’t quite elevated Weird Al territory (though Weird is a sometimes collaborator), and the racial politics of the song were probably tone deaf even for 2001 (Folds claims he’s playing a character, you be the judge). Though this was the title track and the first single, it feels more like a novelty song than a representative of an album of more mature songwriting.

Of Folds’ solo work, I give Songs for Silverman the slight edge over this one, though Pitchfork disagrees. At the very least, this Sept 11, 2001 release (no, really) album assured us that the breakup of Ben Folds Five wouldn’t deprive us of these continued introspective time capsule piano-pop character sketches into the aughts.

Thank you, @mrfasthorse!

And finally, here’s the third ROCKIN’ THE SUBURBS DC that just in came from in @robbiebuffalo.bsky.social hours before this newsletter went out. Again, I could hold it; the odds of ROCKIN’ THE SUBURBS winning are good. But what if it lost? Then I was sitting on a relevant DC I could’ve published but didn’t. I would end up publishing it anyway, but I’d rather have these “live” while the albums are, tournamently-speaking, relevant. Take it away, Robbie!

For Ben Folds' first solo album, he did something he had never done with Ben Folds Five: he titled his album after one of its songs. It was a strange choice because:

- "Rockin' The Suburbs" sounds nothing like the rest of the album and definitely sounds like something someone at a label would suggest because they wanted a "single" (I realized I am basically quoting Tom Petty's "Into the Great Wide Open" now)
- "Rockin' The Suburbs" is easily the worst song on the album. It dials up all of Folds' most irritating qualities to 11. It was dated when it was released and has only gotten more so.

But I'd encourage people to look past this and listen to the rest of the album, which in spirit matches the cover art much more closely than the album title. This is a more pensive, restrained album, eschewing the bloated arrangements of THE UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY OF REINHOLD MESSNER for more straightforward singer-songwriter material. Six of the first eight songs include a person's name, a shift from his more self-centered lyrics from his records with Ben Folds Five. These songs focus on catching a specific moment in the lives of seemingly ordinary people.

The opening song, "Annie Waits" is one of Folds' best songs, managing to be catchy and melodic without being cloying or overworked. It sets the tone for a record where Folds trusts his core songwriting skills, bouncing from more upbeat pop-rock songs ("Zak and Sara" and "Losing Lisa") to more introspective ballads ("Fred Jones Part 2" and "The Ascent of Stan"). Maybe you'll find the sentiment of "Still Fighting It" corny but as someone raising kids now, it hits close to the bone. "Not The Same" is another of my favorites, turning the story of someone's bad trip into a soaring chorus.

When ROCKIN' THE SUBURBS was first released I enjoyed it but didn't find it grabbing me in the same way as his records with Ben Folds Five. But over the last 25 years, it's unquestionably the Ben Folds record I come back to the most. I've seen a lot of griping by some people about the more down-the-middle albums in this tournament. This will be the first (and likely not the last) DC I write supporting one of these albums. I like challenging, original music too. But ultimately I think many people underrate albums that are powered by well-written and well-performed songs. ROCKIN' THE SUBURBS is that type of album.

Thank you, @robbiebuffalo.bsky.social!

Click here to see the current results for the entire tournament, and click here to see the current results for the prediction bracket contest.

Yesterday, #17 Cake, COMFORT EAGLE defeated #112 Margo Guryan, 25 DEMOS, 136-82-3.

Thanks,

Kent