Finally a print review for the tour...Simon Price in the Independent on Sunday on the Brixton show:
Standing up for two hours to watch a guy sitting down at a piano is a strange situation, and it's a rare Brixton gig where the stalls envy the balcony, but Ben Folds Five were always proudly anomalous.
Distinct from the kitsch easy-listening revival that was going on in the mid-Nineties, BFF turned the complex, mellow sounds of Seventies AOR and Fifties jazz into a young man's thing. Their classic second album Whatever and Ever Amen was a quietly radical record, bringing suspended fourths and diminished sixths into a world of moronic majors and minors, bringing "Take Five" rhythms to a "Teen Spirit" generation.
Folds also (re)established the piano as an instrument you could rock with. Not that he cared for the rock mentality: a purveyor of what he once called "punk rock for sissies", Folds has always had a delicious line in hostility towards alternative cliché. Witness the weary sarcasm of the opening to "Underground" ("Hand me my nose ring, lead me to the moshpit ..."), the viciously funny Nu Metal satire "Rockin' the Suburbs" ("You better watch out, I think I'm gonna say 'fuuuck!'"), and the impossibly eloquent title of "One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces".
Looking suspiciously less bald than he did in 2001, Folds, after a decade solo, is back with his band: deft drummer Darren Jessee and unobtrusive bassist Robert Sledge, and it's a wonderful thing to be hearing again the joyous "Jackson Cannery", the wistful "Alice Childress", the heartbreaking "Brick" and the jubilantly vengeful "Song for the Dumped". It's no hardship, either, to hear material from comeback album The Sound of the Life of the Mind which, Folds admits, sold "fewer copies than there are people in this room".
He's an unexpectedly flamboyant stage presence these days, standing to conduct the audience participation, and improvising – as he does on every night – a song called "Rock This Bitch" about the venue itself. In this case, he recalls seeing Rage Against the Machine here in 1997, eating a hamburger, then finding out about mad cow disease the next day.
He's nevertheless glad to be back. London is, he says, "one of the first places we felt understood". And London still understands.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/reviews/ios-pop-review-mumford--sons-secc-glasgowben-folds-five-brixton-academy-london-8395810.htmljust found this one for Birmingham:
also The piano-rock, rock, pop-rock – whatever you want to call it – singer/songwriter from South Carolina is back.
Basically, if a trio of middle-aged men can pull off a double bass on stage and still look good then they’re doing well.
It was the return of the Ben Folds Five – with Darren Jessee and Robert Sledge – at Birmingham’s O2 Academy last night, 13 years since they first split up.
Folds himself has gone on to a fine career since – the brilliant Landed was the only solo song meshed into last night’s set – as the band focused on their previous hits.
Missing the War, Selfless Cold and Composed and The Battle of Who Could Care Less were belted out with the gusto of the 1990s.
New album The Sound of the Life of the Mind was well represented but old favourites Narcolepsy, Evaporated, One Angry Dwarf & 200 Solemn Faces and Brick - arguably the band’s biggest hit - were gratefully received.
Pianist Folds’ geeky deviation from the plot is part of the charm and his mid-set story about Sonny Bono and Elvis’ verbal sparring after briefly messing up one track went with the flow.
Finishing on Army, one Folds performed at solo gigs, underlined its popularity with audience and band. As if it was needed.
By Nick Mashiter
http://www.expressandstar.com/entertainment/2012/12/04/review-ben-folds-five-at-o2-academy-birmingham/