Live Review: Ben Folds, Dork-Pop Wunderkind

Dork-pop's reigning boy wonder trounced through a stellar batch of his Top Forties hits last night at New York's Beacon Theater, supplementing polished crowd-pleasers with expertly picked covers. Just to hear Mr. Folds' piano-plunking take on Dr. Dre's "Bitches Ain't Shit" and a bourbon-soaked reading of Hank Williams' "Your Cheatin' Heart," complete with hillbilly twang, was almost worth the price of admission alone. Folds drew some criticism with the recent release of Supersunnyspeedgraphic, which had some fans grumbling that the album was merely a jumble of tracks previously released on iTunes and the Over the Hedge soundtrack. But the Beacon crowd didn't seem to mind — the songs themselves have aged well over the years.

According to Folds, the Beacon show was his last fall tour stop. "After this, we're going into the studio and making a new record," he told the crowd, proceeding to "preview" tracks from the yet to-be-recorded new album. A could-be working title from the mix included "Coach Paul Simmons," a fiery call-and-response about a muscle-bound beefcake that Folds and his band ran into while working out at a hotel gym. Punctuated by bass guitarist Jose Hernandez's slick licks and forceful catcalls of "no!" the track sounded like a nursery rhyme for a day at the stud ranch. After a few minutes ferocious banging on his wheeze-prone synthesizer, the singer began taking audience requests, assuming a Yoga Journal-worthy tree pose. "You want me to show you my dick?" Folds asked a pervy fan before launching into a stream-of-consciousness ditty about male genitalia (and inadvertently displaying a promising future as a Cialis jingle writer.)

But it was Gen-Y classics from the Ben Folds Five canon that really roused the audience's attention. Songs like "Army" and "One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces" were treated as the twentysomething anthems they've become. From the crowd response, it was clear that half-baked Cialis advertisements can't take the place of angst-ridden piano pop.

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Song Stories

“Time to Pretend”

MGMT | 2008

Listening to MGMT’s breakthrough song, one might interpret it as being about the excesses of rock stardom, but it’s actually about the duo’s pet praying mantis. Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden told Rolling Stone they got the idea from the insect's jerky movements. The mantis died, but the two bandmates kept the egg sack and allowed the hundreds of eggs to hatch. “We tried to name them all, but they died after a day,” said Goldwasser, with VanWyngarden chiming in, “But the praying mantis dance inspired us.”

More Song Stories entries »

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