Tour name: The Sound of the Life of the Mind
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/164311-ben-folds-five-25-september-2012-houston-tx/
The band brought the crowd to their feet (finally!) for “Philosophy”, which was played mercifully straight this time around. Folds tends to go into a pretty terrible piano rendition of Dick Dale’s “Misirlou” in the middle of this song when he plays it solo, and that didn’t happen here. They followed it up with the equally energetic “Kate” and closed with a pounding rendition of “Song for the Dumped” (aside from the Weather Channel diversion), which had the whole audience shouting “Fuck you, too!” along with the band.
The trio came back out for an encore and finished up with two more high energy crowd favorites, “Underground” and “Army”. The former had people up and dancing all over the theater. As for “Army”, Folds has been having audiences sing the song’s horn parts for so long now that he no longer even bothers to try to divide the crowd in half and teach them those parts beforehand. And sure enough, the crowd enthusiastically sang those bits while the band drove hard towards the end of the song.
It was a great show, buoyed at the end by a strong crowd reaction.
