If There Is a God He Is Laughing at Us and Our Football Team

When Al Gore invented the interwebs, he must have had YouTube in mind because there is no greater accessory to the World Wide Web because you can basically watch any video ever created there. Of course the downside to YouTube is you can basically watch any video ever created including an absurd amount of videos of crappy singers destroying songs. One of the few variations of those singers that doesn’t suck are the numerous a capella groups that rework songs without any instruments but their mouths.

One of the all-time greats was UC Berkley’s DeCadence who broke out Dr. Dre’s seminal (Expletive Delete) Ain’t (Expletive Deleted) in the vein of Ben Fold’s cover (see below, naturally not all that safe for due to the song title). Now this may or may not been the catalyst for Ben Folds to tour the county to get a capella groups to rerecord his songs but it is a pretty novel idea that resulted in Ben Folds Presents: University a Capella! Sadly (Expletive Delete) Ain’t (Expletive Deleted) didn’t make the cut.



The songs that did are a mix of Folds’ solo work like Landed (The University of Chicago Buffoons) and Jesusland (UNC Chapel Hill Loreleis) as well as some Five classic like Brick (Leading Tones) and Selfless, Cold and Composed (The Sacramento State Jazz). Ben even pulls a Bobby McFarrin on two tracks, Boxer and Effington, performing all the parts sans a few kids on the latter song. Considering Folds sometimes frantic piano style is, it amazing some of the arrangement like Not the Same (The Spartones) though most groups stuck to his slower songs. I’m not sure how much replay value the album has as a whole, but if you have a large mp3 library, one of these songs coming up on random will certainly break up your playlist.

Song to Download - Effington

Ben Folds Present: University a Capella! gets a on my Terror Alert Scale.