Ben Lee: Breathing Tornados : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Once the toast of the indie-pop brat pack, Ben Lee is so anxious to grow up on his third solo album, Breathing Tornados, that he wrote a song about it. "Today a boy outgrew his town. . . . Today a boy became a man," he sings on "I Am a Sunflower." What next? A career in accounting? With Breathing Tornados, the twenty-year-old Lee has shucked off a few of his teenage trademarks: the smirk, the acoustic guitar, the pop-culture name-dropping. Now he walks his once-pristine melodies through a synthetic playground of drum loops, keyboards and alien noises concocted by producer Ed Buller (Spiritualized, Pulp, Suede). Lee is also no longer so insufferably earnest; his lyrics have a more allusive, open-ended quality. Only "Birthday Song," a maudlin, love-sick ballad that comes closest to the singer-songwriter narratives of his past, is a dud. Otherwise, he swaggers with Henry Mancini-like horns on "Nighttime," digs into the metallic throb of "Ship My Body Home," cruises past his bitterness on the loungy trip-hop of "Cigarettes Will Kill You" and drifts off into a kind of beautiful desolation on the closing "Sleepwalking." Maturity -- it doesn't always have to suck. (RS 810)

GREG KOT