Welcome to my very first music review. If you’re interested in hearing about rockin’ guitar riffs, and beats you can dance to, you might not be interested in my opinion. So be it. Welcome nonetheless.

This album makes me want to cook a gourmet dinner. The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner playing in the background, a compliment to rising scents from the stove, and a full glass of wine to inspire my cooking. I want to light candles on the dinner table, sway through the house as if I always moved that way, and invite quiet conversation among my guests with witty repartee as they anticipate my culinary delights.

As this is my first music review, I should explain that, for me, music is measured by what it can add to an experience. Music is how I enhance my reading material, my driving, my sorrows, my dancing. And by this measuring stick, Ben Folds Five’s The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner will give any dinner party the misty dream-like quality that goes into making good memories - regardless of your cooking abilities. Fluegelhorns in the background will make me hungry for some time to come.

Overall, Ben Folds Five has given us an enjoyable creation. I can’t quite pin down how to classify their music. Rich, full, harmonising, and more than enough piano me - anything with piano I’m predisposed to. I picked up this album because of the hit Army, which I wasn’t growing bored of, despite the typical overplay of our local radio stations. But one song can’t guarantee that a band has anything else worth listening to. This time I lucked out. I’m listening to the CD for the third time in a row, and I keep lifting my pen so I can focus on being swallowed into the tango-esque beat of Mess and anticipate the magic (yes, it fits) in the next track, Magic. And wondering if it would seem inappropriately kinky to say that Regret is a good make-out song. After all, you have to listen to a Southern man talk in and around the definitely seductive tune.

The only track I can’t enjoy, for no one reason I can pin down, is the last one - Lullaby. My thought is that as I have already been lulled into being a 4-star chef and loquacious host, that by the end of the CD the mood it invokes is redundant. I suppose here would be a good point to interject that my boyfriend thinks all the songs sound the same, specifically like the Beatles, by which he does not mean to be complimentary. I think there is a sameness to the music, but I find it to be a distinct style developed by the band, and not something to be disappointed by. They don’t sound quite like anyone else, which doesn’t seem easy to do, if you pay attention to any mainstream music these days.

Have I yet told you anything that will make you go buy this CD? If you’re not much of a cook, don’t let that stop you. Find the place where The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner fits into your life, and enjoy.

P.S. I’m working on a grading system that will make sense outside of my own music associations. Stars don’t quite cut it for me. I wouldn’t listen to this album on a long road trip, but you know what I’ll play at my next dinner party, and I can think of a couple other activities where this might fit into the background. As long as I can tap my toes, it’ll work.