Ben Folds: The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Beneath the gorgeous melodies, ironic bombast and deftly humorous lyrics, the world according to Ben Folds Five is a pretty grim place, especially when it comes to matters of the heart. To whatever small degree women take on reality in this band's songs, they are bottomless pits of need ("She's a brick, and I'm drowning slowly"), to be pitied, reassured and, as soon as reasonably possible, abandoned.

Of course, if, horror of horrors, some chick abandons you, freedom ain't so cool. When the woman in "Song for the Dumped," on 1997's Whatever and Ever Amen, says she wants "some space," the response is immediate (and hilarious): "Fuck you, too/Give me my money back, you bitch." The male narcissists in these songs are so desperate for approval that rejection is an inconceivable insult. These guys - think of them as slacker Seinfelds - are all smart, funny and charmingly obsessive, but they mistake a preoccupation with their every emotional twitch for insight.

Which brings us to the ambitious, irritating, confounding, catchy and strangely compelling The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner, aptly described by a friend of mine as "Billy Joel's lost prog-rock opera." "Radiohead for geeks" might be another way of looking at it. In other words, yes, kids, this is a concept album. And Ben Folds and producer Caleb Southern have defined a big, dramatic sound to support it. Having introduced the radical notion of musical chops to the indie-rock scene back in '95, Folds truly goes for the gusto here. By any measure, it's a stunning shift in direction for the group.

The arrangements are filled with grand gestures. In addition to the combo's standard lineup (the hyperactive Folds on piano, Darren Jessee on drums, Robert Sledge on bass), a four-piece string section adorns many of these tracks, lending them a lush, cinematic feel. Saxophones and a fluegelhorn add a further sense of sonic expansiveness. Key and tempo shifts abound. Songs have what might be considered movements, and at least one section of the album could be called a suite.

As for the "concept" itself, that's a little harder to discern - this isn't Tommy, Ziggy Stardust, Joe's Garage or OK Computer. The title is a spoof of tell-all celebrity culture, but Ben Folds' Reinhold Messner is far from famous. He's kind of a nerd Everyman who struggles to hold onto some slender sense of self and direction in the face of his inability to accept love, find work he cares about or, on the basis of the album's opening song, "Narcolepsy," even stay awake. The back story is that Reinhold Messner - in real life, the first man to reach the top of Mount Everest without extra oxygen - was the name on the fake ID that Folds and his pals used for sneaking into bars when they were underage.

Along with its more elaborate songs, Reinhold is filled with tunes like Whatever's "Brick" -- that is, richly melodic ballads that take the form of romantic declarations but wind up expressing emotions that are, at best, far more ambivalent. Early on, in "Don't Change Your Plans," the singer tells a lover, "I loved you before I met you/And I met you just in time." A fluegelhorn solo evokes Burt Bacharach's Sixties pop romances, but we're no longer in that particular Kansas, where undying love routinely transforms ordinary life into a wonderland. "Don't change your plans for me," Folds tenderly advises. "I won't move to L.A." Then the priceless kiss-off: "I love you, goodbye."

"Magic," written by Jessee, features a beautiful piano figure and a "sha-la-la" chorus that recalls the innocence of Simon and Garfunkel; it also honestly admits, "I knew you'd be gone as soon as you could/And I hoped you would." The album's last two songs, "Jane" and "Lullabye," prop up yet another passive damsel in distress and conjure a surreal fantasy of escape from all this responsibility: "Just the three of us took flight that night/Uncle Richard, me and James Earl Jones." That's not exactly "Marlon Brando, Pocahontas and me," the pot-stoked vision that Neil Young once summoned to imagine a kinder, gentler American history, but, once again, we don't live in that world anymore.

Maybe we never really did. Folds' Reinhold Messner isn't especially likable, and he certainly isn't heroic. Despite the music's reach, his life - and the lives of those around him - is consumed by small worries, pointless betrayals, tentative displays of affection, secret pains and touching hopes that often seem indistinguishable from mere daydreams. His story is human-scale, and it's unauthorized because it's the quotidian story of the "pettiness which plays so rough," in Dylan's phrase, the inner story that none of us wants told about ourselves. As this album powerfully shows, telling that tale is Ben Folds Five's sad, unsettling, laff-a-minute gift.