Whatever And Ever Amen

Whatever and Ever Amen is the second album by indie rock band Ben Folds Five. The music is dominated by the piano of frontman and singer Ben Folds. That does not mean it's full of ballads as most songs are more uptempo. Sometimes a little bombastic, witty lyrics and great vocals, it's a great album. The production (in a front room of a house) is not very clean and clouded, but that gives the tracks a live feeling. The best songs are "One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces", "Song for the Dumped", "Brick", "Kate", "Smoke" and "Evaporated".

A personal all time favourite. Never dull with a lot of dynamic swings.

I prefer Folds' solo stuff, but this is an excellent album overall. There's the catchy lead, "Brick", of course, but for me, there are two songs that makes this album: "Song for the Dumped" and "Steven's Last Night in Town", the former because it's what we're all thinking anyway, and the latter because it's Ben Folds at his most surreal and zany.

I always like it when I think: "I've never heard of this band", and then 1 song comes up that I recognize. Here it was 'Song for the Dumped'. Banger of a song! The piano-filled rock music is very fun to listen to

Love this album. I owned it on CD back in the day. Good to revisit!

Ben Folds grows on me more every year. Fun tunes, great sound, a touch of quirkiness mixed with sometimes heavy themes. Love it all, man. Song for the dumped is a banger

Whatever and Ever Amen is a super fun album with heaps of uptempo songs, and I appreciated it much more than I expected to. The lyrics are great, and unlike a lot of clever or funny lyrics, ("Give me my money back, you bitch!") they stay good after repeated listens. "Fair" is my favourite song on the album, for the combination of text, music and feeling. Musically, "One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces" is my favourite.

First time listening to Ben Folds Five and it was some nice piano-driven music. I only knew him from those old chat roulette videos he did almost 2 decades ago. My personal rating: 4/5 My rating relative to the list: 4/5 Should this have been included on the original list? Slight yes.

This starts off in a nice, upbeat - almost joyous - way. Love this piano work. I enjoyed this. It's not something I'd ever listen to again, and the less we say of the cover of Video Killed The Radio Star the better.

Brick is one of my favorite songs, the whole album is good. I haven't listened to it in many, many years. Standouts: Brick, One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces, Cigarette, Missing The War, Evaporated 4/5

Rating: 7/10 Best songs: One angry dwarf and 2000 solemn faces, Fair

I loved 'Kate' as a teen. There's loads to love here. I used to just love the fun songs on here, and still do, though 30 years on, Song for the Dumped sounds very incel. Older, I'm finding the more subtle emotionally devastating songs hit more. It's got a really wide range and frankly, the whole thing made me very happy, even if I now realise Kate is not a happy go lucky pop love song but a creepy stalker fun pop song.

Cool album. Been meaning to check it out for years ever since I heard Selfless, Cold and Composed. Definitely not always in the mood for something like this but I can dig it pretty often. 7/10

Ben can do no wrong in my eyes.

Loved this album when it came out, saw them in concert, then pretty much forgot about Ben Folds except when he would occasionally pop up on the radio. I'm actually surprised to see they've only released two albums since this one (although Ben Folds has a few solo albums as well). Still a great album, holds up almost 30 years later. 4 stars.

I don't dislike Whatever And Ever Amen but there's something about it that just doesn't grab me, it's quirky and interesting and has depth but it's a little too cute for my preferences, almost like it wants to be cool and tries a bit too hard to be. I dunno, I liked some parts and switched off entirely on others, probably tips a low 3 but not much more.

A decent album with a few genuinely great songs, but the piano-led sound started to grate after a while. There’s plenty of energy and personality here, and the standout songs are really strong, but I found the overall sound a bit repetitive across the full album.

This album really demonstrates how important the order of tracks can be. For example, Brick is a song that's slow, mellow, and mature. It's a genuinely great piece of art about feeling depressed and isolated and how his lover doesn't fix any of that. I see why people praise it so much. HOWEVER, the track immediately following it completely kills it. Completely 180's everything that makes it good. Song For The Dumped is, as the title implies, a breakup song. That's fine in and of itself. The relationship in Brick was preeeeeetty doomed and if the following song was something like "I am sad because I got dumped" or "this breakup is making me think about my life and try to change some things" or really anything other than what Song For The Dumped actually is it would've been fine. Because Song For The Dumped is a truly toxic and bitter "who needed you anyway you're a bitch and I want my stuff back" type of song. It's just incel shit, possibly an ur-example of the type given it came out before the idea of an incel was popularized. And that makes me look back at Brick and go "oh so your problem was just that you're a miserable loser who hates everyone but especially women and you were just able to effectively disguise that for one song." You can have toxic incel shit on your record and still have that record be good. And maybe treating this song like a direct continuation of the previous one is unfair. And I *hope* that Song For The Dumped is supposed to be a caricature and not Ben Folds's authentic thoughts about a real breakup. (The fact that the remastered edition ends on a version of Song For The Dumped in Japanese but keeps the words "you bitch" unchanged doesn't inspire confidence there.) But the juxtaposition of these two songs is so utterly baffling that the album doesn't really recover for me. If you're more able to look past that one song, the album is genuinely pretty good. I'd otherwise give it a 4/5, but I'm absolutely knocking a star off for this because to me it genuinely is that bad a creative decision, so final score 3/5.

I like some Ben Folds in moderation. Some cute little piano rock tunes on here.

Inoffensive and mild

Certainly this is polished output from talented people. It's clever - but a fair chunk of that cleverness strikes me as marked by a certain faint smirking self-regard that turned the corners of my lips down. The relationship stuff sounds like it was written by someone who would end up having been married and divorced five times before turning 60. I can't really fault the music but I came out decidedly cool on this band that I'd never spent much time with before.

Not bad

Always been on the fence with Folds’ music, and this album tiptoes the line between too singer-songwriter or sufficiently instrumental-driven for me. The whole thing feels a bit like an art school final project, too casual and tongue-in-cheek to take seriously but not quite committed to the bit. Folds oscillates from upbeat goofiness to almost bitterness on some tracks, leaving this album feeling a bit jumbled and unsatisfying to listen to.