Ben Folds Five
The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner
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Taking time out from an East Coast spring college tour for this club date, Ben Folds Five played their fifth Washington area show in a year in support of their most recent album, The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner. Folds suggested early in the show that the band's familiarity with the Washington audience perhaps gave them permission to screw things up. But over the course of their hour and forty-five minute set, there were few missteps.

The band opened with "Jackson Cannery," the first track from their self-titled 1995 debut. That album is full of wonderful genre-bending, piano-pounding pop with a modern, wise-ass sensibility. Folds draws not only on his piano rock forebears (Jerry Lee Lewis, Elton, Billy Joel, Todd Rundgren) and latter day heroes (early Joe Jackson, Squeeze with Jools Holland) but also on classical, jazz, honky-tonk, Broadway, barrelhouse and Victor Borge. You're likely to hear shades of Rachmaninoff, the Gershwins and Elvis Costello, often within the same song. But the band also includes Robert Sledge's brilliant fuzz bass playing, and Darren Jessee's inventive drumming.

With Messner, the band branched out a bit. There were Bacharach-ian ballads, weird answering machine message experiments, thoughtful and meditative numbers and lots of orchestrated strings and horns. For many fans, the newly complex arrangements didn't have the immediate impact of the band's earlier work. But those songs performed live take on a new life of their own.

The moody, autumnal "Don't Change Your Plans" was sparkling even with the horn parts sung by Sledge & Jessee. The epic "Narcolepsy" showcased Jessee's fantastic drum work. During the song, Folds climbed on top of the piano, pretended to fall asleep and then proceeded to roll off onto the stage below. He got up and led the crowd in a little audience participation on the song's "I'm not tired" refrain. "Regrets" showed remarkable dynamic range, as the band cranked up the volume towards the end of the song. For the pretty Jessee-penned ballad "Magic," the drummer added timpani, tambourine and cymbal accents. Even the novelty throwaway "Your Redneck Past" shined with more of Jessee's outstanding skins work and Sledge on keyboards.

But it was the album's most accessible song, the very funny "Army," that drew the biggest crowd response early on. That song is more along the lines of material from the band's first two albums. Fortunately the band offered a healthy dose of those records as well. That included a nicely-harmonized "Philosophy" and a blistering run though "The Last Polka" (which doesn't sound much like a polka at all). They closed the main set with the bouncy "Underground" which cleverly skewers the alternative crowd ("Hand me my nose ring, Show me the mosh pit")

Several songs from 1997's Whatever and Ever Amen were also featured including the rollicking "Ob-La-Di"-like "Kate" and the slacker anthem "Battle of Who Could Care Less." For "Steven's Last Night In Town," Folds came out from behind the piano to play melodica. And one of the highlights of the show was "Fair" featuring Sledge's fuzz bass, silly falsetto vocals and lots of beautifully harmonized "Ahhhs."

The band pulled out some early songs that appear on their odds-and-sods collection Naked Baby Photos including the nicely-building "Eddie Walker" and "Tom and Mary" which featured some of Folds' best piano solos.

A faithful cover of the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star" was another highlight of the show with Sledge and Jessee nailing all the harmonies.

And they road-tested one new song, "The Secret Life of Morgan Davis," which seemed to combine the sing-songy verses of something from Messner with the pace of something from the first record. The band is reportedly at work on a new record for late 2000 release that will take them back to their earlier sound. If crowd reactions are any indication, it's probably a wise move.

Opener Tracy Bonham's guitar rocker grrrl posing and suggestive lyrics seemed a bit of a mismatch with Folds' post-ironic piano pop. But she proved herself a confident performer with a solid band as they took on songs from her 1996 debut Burdens of Being Upright and the newly-released Down Here. Bonham brought to mind Courtney Love, Chrissie Hynde, Joan Jett and Alanis Morissette and showed her versatility, switching between guitar and violin during her 45-minute set.

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