Bring the Noize: Old Big Star, new Ben Folds

Ben Folds Five
The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner
Sony Music

It is a good month for pop music. The sun is shining. Attractive people are frolicking all over campus, wearing less clothing than usual. It makes one want to sing a happy tune. Fortunately, both Ben Folds Five and Big Star have new LPs out, but neither sounds as sunny as longtime fans would expect.

Nobody Can Dance is not a normal live album. It's a combination of two EPs. The first half is from a March 1974 rehearsal tape. The second half comes from a live concert from a May 1974 Memphis show, making this album the first release of a nonradio live album recorded during the band's career as a working unit. 

Pop audiophiles be forewarned: Nobody Can Dance does not contain the sound quality of recent Cheap Trick reissues or even the original Big Star albums. If you like your pop rough-and-tumble, dry and sweet, Nobody Can Dance will do the trick. For rarities, the album excels, with two covers: the Box Tops hit "The Letter" and T. Rex's "Baby Strange."

Listeners who have only heard The Bangles cover of "September Gurls" will be surprised to hear two Big Star versions of the archetypal summer pop song. 

Some may be annoyed by the repetition of four songs over the album's 15 tracks, but truth be told, there is not much more Big Star to release. In the words of lesser popsmiths: "It's all been done before."

Speaking of Barenaked Ladies, some pop bands are content to churn out samey, rote tunes once they have hit a formula that 1. works and 2. keeps them a step ahead of the rest of the pack. Ben Folds Five could have easily rested on the rocker-ballad-rocker format of its last two albums and walked away with a handful of benjamins.

Instead, it has handed in its most moody, melancholy effort yet, recorded in the following the dissolution of Folds' marriage. The record shows the band at its most introspective and most depressing. 

The album contains its share of possible hit singles like "Army," "Magic" and "Mess," although it takes quite a few solitary spins of Messner to really get into it. Fans of the radio hit "Brick" will be pleased by the astonishing number of ballads on Messner, and fans of Big Star's third album will probably dig the forlorn singer-songwriter schtick. 

BF5 no longer receives hit points for name-checking Kool Moe Dee, Billy Idol and obscure mountain climbers. As the Beastie Boys discovered this past fall, hip cultural reference points do not make great albums--great songs do.

--Adam Metz