Day 18: Self-titled - Ben Folds Five (1995)
Happy Birthday to me!
You'll all have to forgive me if today's Record Reconstructor is slightly truncated from its usual length. You see, not only have I been struggling to find something significant about this album to talk about, but also I'm nursing a low-grade but significant hangover from a very fun day yesterday. Let's get right to it.
listen to me here
This is the first time I've had to write about a band I've already covered in a previous blog post. I listened back to this over the course of this morning, sat in a car hand wash waiting for the inside of our car to be valeted before we head off on our holidays tomorrow. And the truth is, I have a weirdly ambivalent relationship with the album which I can intellectually recognise isn't entirely fair, but nonetheless keeps me at arms length from engaging with it in the same way I did with "Whatever and Ever, Amen".
I think it comes from my dislike of 'backfilling' a band's discography.
After buying their second album, the next BF5 album I bought was "Naked Baby Photos" in 1998, which I can see is on my CD rack about 45 days away, so I'll save my thoughts on it until then. However, it's a collection of B-sides, demos, and live versions of songs, which meant my first exposure to several of the classic singles from this album (specifically "Boxing", "Jackson Cannery" and "Underground") actually came first from hearing the live versions on the 1998 album.
Obviously, there was something there - the songs were well loved enough to be featured in different versions on the rarities album - so I felt compelled to go back and backfill the previous album, which it turns out was difficult enough to find that I had to go to an HMV in Manchester to find it, in order to hear the original, 'pure' versions of those singles. I think sometimes I can irrationally assume that if I missed out on a band's debut, but heard and enjoyed their sophmore album, then perhaps the first album missed the mark, was something of an incomplete form of the band who created the sound I liked on their second time at-bat.
It's possible that the fact I had to go out of my way to find it, and that my expectations of it were pre-determined as an inferior product that I felt compelled to own out of necessity rather than desire, have warped my memory such that I don't have a strong sense of listening to this with any frequency at all. When I said in my Day 0 post that every album here had some kind of story associated with it, this one is a blank, a cypher - I assume I must have listened to it enough that I recognise all the songs on it, but somehow it failed to make the same impression that their other albums, both "Whatever and Ever Amen" and "The Unauthorised Biography..." (their 3rd 'proper' studio album) did.
From a dispassionate perspective, it's an absolutely fine album, full of fun songs which show the same blend of the emotional, whimsical and comedic sensibilities which would make their second album such a hit for me. I can't honestly tell you why I don't feel about it the same way I do their other albums. Maybe it just came too late in my musical education to get a seat at the table, and existed just as a checkmark, a box ticked in the "hey, I own all of their stuff at least" column.
But sat in the sun this morning, with my low grade hangover, watching my car get washed as I thought about how lucky I am to have spent the previous day celebrating my birthday with a circle of great friends, and with these songs in my ears, perhaps today it's finally found the memory I'll associate with the album for the rest of my life.
