Ben Jelen

Ex-Sensitive

(Custard)

Record Review by Amber Henson

Here’s something truly disturbing: Oasis became popular when I was in middle school. So now there are bands running around that were influenced by them, like The Strokes.  And then there are bands running around that were influenced by The Strokes, like The Arctic Monkeys.  So Oasis is a grandfather band.  And The Beatles may as well have been Jesus, for all they’ve done for the musical world, and their comparative age.

Ben Jelen has several tracks on Ex-Sensitive that are Oasis-anthemic in nature, which is what led me to this freakout.  Occasionally, Jelen seems to channel Liam Gallagher, which I’m sure is a very strange experience for Liam. There are also some tracks that remind me of a band I shouldn’t even bring up, for fear of being ostracized by my readers, but what the hell: Third Eye Blind.  I know.  Stupid.  But we all make mistakes.  On Jelen’s MySpace page, his "About Me" says “I delved deeper than I ever had into the Beatles catalogue,” before he wrote this album and this comes across.

Much of the album is uplifting, in lyrics and music.  In fact, it often sounds like it belongs in the middle of a musical, during the part when a secondary character is trying to talk up the main character.  Sometimes Jelen busts out what seems to be a full orchestra.  It’s a quite impressive feat, though it doesn’t always yield equally impressive results.

Jelen’s voice, when not a Gallagher brother, is sweet, forceful, and has some unexplainable '80s quality to it.   It might be all the "ooohs" and "aahhs".  But overall, while the album can sometimes get a little too sappy for my liking, Jelen has accomplished making something that should all make his listeners want to try a little harder at life.