New Music Wednesday!

Each Wednesday, I will (attempt) to review two or three songs that I am hearing for the first time and review them, in an effort to both broaden my own musical tastes and perhaps inspire you to do the same. This week, however, I will be reviewing a new album instead. I hope this is still interesting.

Album Review
Ben Folds, Stems and Seeds, 2009

One of the hallmarks of Ben Folds' 14-year career has been his consistently friendly relationship with his fans. Well known for talking with departing concertgoers and signing autographs after his shows, his musical career is inseperable from his fan base. These are folks who still revel in Ben Folds Five's label as "punk rock for sissies" and loudly request obscure b-sides at concerts instead of hits. Ben has kept his ticket prices down and is known for leading the audience in multi-part choral accompaniments to not one, but two of his more famous songs. Prior to his latest album, he personally released a "leaked" version online, only to fleece fans with six fake versions of his new songs, complete with laughably bad lyrics. Over the last two months, he has been flying to college campuses to meet and record with the a cappella groups he selected in his a cappella covers contest, and these recordings will end up on an offically released CD.

All that to say that while fan reaction was pretty positive to his third proper solo album, 2008's Way to Normal, there was one glaring disappointment across fan boards online: the album's mastering. Mixed at high volume and unbelievably compressed, the album was passable on car stereos but was abrasive in headphones. Although meant to sound somewhat distorted, the album's more daring experimentation (very high bass distortion on "Dr. Yang", empty Altoids cans taped to piano strings on "Free Coffee") was often more headache-inducing than revelatory. Way to Normal was publically compared by some scribes to Metallica's Death Magnetic and Iggy and the Stooges' remastered Raw Power as among the most unlistenably loud records ever. This was a shame, for all of his new material, real or fake, sounded amazing live and unmixed. At any rate, the vociferous online Folds fans were pretty unanimous in hating the mastering.

Enter Ben Folds, Man of the People. While standing by his decision to try new and different things with his producer, he acknowledged the high prevalence of audiophiles in his fan base and decided to release a second version of his album to his fan club and then to the general public. Stems and Seeds is exactly what the title implies, once you look beyond the obvious joke for stoners everywhere. The 2-CD set consists of one set of all 11 studio tracks in individual stems (i.e., isolated piano tracks, vocal tracks, bass tracks, etc), which allow fans to remix each tune as they see fit with applications such as Garage Band. The second CD, entitled Seeds, is made up of the 11 studio tracks, 6 "fake" tracks, and several other bonus tracks without any compression whatsoever. Indeed, the instruments are seperated and balanced very well and the sound quality in headphones is extremely pleasing.

While overall improvement was not necessarily the goal of this release, reveleations abound with the very first listen. While only a few of the remixes add something new (not a bad thing at all), the most improved aspect is the quality of the vocals. The new track order allows "Effington" and its three-part harmony to open the CD, and the effect is akin to the opening numbers of many modern musicals. "Frown Song", which suffered from a particularly abrasive vocal on the proper album, sounds very natural here and could probably have even made the radio in this incarnation, if there was a censored version. The bass in "Dr. Yang" is still radically distorted but the effect is not diminished with the reduction in volume and compression. Ditto for "Free Coffee" and the Altoid tins. "Kylie from Connecticut", while mostly piano and vocals, is done a better turn with this mastering, as the strings added into the bridge sound far more poignant and creative than on the original album.

"You Don't Know Me", Ben's duet with Regina Spektor, shines even more here as a pop gem. The intermittent but effective injections of strings work so much better in this mastering. If you hear one song from this CD, make it this one. More than catchy, it's infectious and creative on a level that few artists ever aspire to. This release also provides a taped rehearsal from Late Night with Conan O'Brien, where Regina joined Ben and his band. It's probably just as satisfying of a listen.

The fake tracks all sound brilliant, as the only previously available versions for four of the six of them were MySpace downloads. This is also the CD debut of the fake track "Bitch Went Nutz", which is maybe the funniest thing Ben has ever written. "Hiroshima (Japanese Version)" is a fun novelty but won't replace the upbeat English original on any mixtape, at least in the US. The aformentioned Conan rehearsal is only available on this release as well.

In conclusion, this is the rare release of previously released, remixed material that would actually be of interest to more than die-hard fans. While I would imagine that most people would not mind the difference either way, any serious fan of music would do better with Stems and Seeds over Way to Normal. Should you happen to be buying soon, Stems and Seeds is priced about the same and features far more music, even on the Seeds CD alone. And for audiophiles like yours truly, the choice is obvious.