Ben Folds Five: Army
Continuing my list of the Top 10 albums of 1999, coming in at #6 is The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner by Ben Folds Five. Ben Folds was born 20 years too late to be a pop star, but he would have had a string of top 10 hits in the ’70s and ’80s. After a great but relatively ignored debut, the group’s second album, Whatever and Ever Amen, spawned the top 20 hit “Brick.” Unfortunately, pop music in the mid-late 1990s did not favor the type of music being produced by artists such as Ben Folds and that was the group’s sole Top 40 hit. While the state of pop music in the mid-90s was on the verge of falling victim to corporate-controlled, sanitized boredom by producers intent on creating the same songs over and over (a practice that has been successful and profitable for 30 years and counting), artists like Ben Folds, and some others still to come on this list, were creating wonderful pop tunes that would have ruled radio 20 years earlier. When Ben Folds Five released their third album in 1999, there was no chance that any of the songs would chart as pop hits. Even so, this album is filled with a variety of material that ranges from jazz-influenced ballads to indie-rock to catchy pop. Folds’ lyrics are always wonderful, and he wrote catchy hooks as well as anyone of his era, and songs like “Don’t Change Your Plans,” “Mess,” “Army,” and “Lullabye” are no exception. Folds went solo after the release and relatively disappointing sales of this album (it shows the state of pop music at the time when an album sells 300 thousand copies and it is a disappointment), and the group would only record one more album (13 years later), but while the first two albums contain his most popular tunes, this is arguably his most mature and complete record. The themes of these songs show an artist at a turning point in his life and career, and the always wonderful production of Caleb Southern was never better than on these songs. Ben Folds will never rise above cult status, but in a better world of pop music this album would have made him a household name.
To learn more about Ben Folds Five, check out their Wikipedia page.
To listen to all of the songs of the day, check out the Radio Faux Show Song of the Day playlist.
The Radio Faux Show 