The Internet told me that this is a picture of Ben Folds’ house.

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[5.00]

Edward Okulicz: Robert Sledge’s bass on “House” is unmistakeably an ingredient Folds has long missed since he went solo; clear and melodic yet fuzzed up, it was the secret weapon on the first two BFF records. Good to have it back, but I’d have liked some more of those 1995 harmonies again beyond an “aah” towards the end. Everything else you’d expect is here — a pretty piano motif, great bass parts and Folds singing it much the same as he sang any of BFF’s non-ballads from the 90s as if all their songs were about the same thing. I’ll hold out a verdict on the reunion ’til the album proper but this is good enough for a greatest hits.
[7]

Anthony Easton: I would have loved this in high school because I’d think it were a perfect expression of suburban ennui, but I grew up in the suburbs and learned to hate it like I always should have. Now I am older, and I’ve put away childish things, like hating the suburbs, like dismissing the domestic, like assuming that melancholy ballads of isolation are the only thing that the world could offer. There are other spaces, other narratives — narratives that Folds hints on the kind of brilliant Rockin’ the Suburbs, and has promptly forgotten on this piece of maudlin trash. 
[4]

Iain Mew: A decent, if very slow to get going, arrangement in search of a song and voice to match it — it’s not going to find them here.
[4]

Jonathan Bogart: American nerd-rock staple still around, still making music that sounds as though he hasn’t heard anything since 1974.
[4]

Josh Langhoff: At risk of sounding insensitive to a Very Important Song About Abuse, I’m gonna say this sounds like a Ben Folds-y exercise in writing an EZ listening song about a haunted house that wants to eat him. (Haunted… and fetid.) If it’s just about associating a home with pastlove, that subject’s been handled more trenchantly by Freedy Johnston in”Knock It Down” and Barenaked Ladies in “The OldApartment”.
[3]

Jonathan Bradley: Oddly enough, Robert Sledge and Darren Jessee aren’t the Taboo and apl.de.ap of ’90s college rock; maybe it’s just Sledge’s bass fuzz, but this is recognizably the Five rather than Folds on his own. As for the song: They’ve properly understood that as crowd-pleasing as their gratuitous naughtiness was (“Song for the Dumped”), their best moments were the contemplative ones (“Evaporated,” say, or “Magic”). “House” is pretty but slight, and though it hits emotional notes, they’re not particularly distinctive. It’s most reminiscent of the filler that just held their albums back from being great. 
[5]

Brad Shoup: Ben Folds Five closed the 1990s with The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner, one of the best rock albums of its decade. A portrait of the asshole in his twenties, the record shifted mercilessly between catalogued sins of omission, self-pity, and retreats into childhood. It was miles from the band’s earlier, sardonic biographical sketches and band-geek potshots, and it largely stiffed. The Five’s three spun into their solo orbits, and Ben ended up in Australia for a time, reviving those character studies (with the empathy transmuted into emotionalism), recording an atrociously cheeky cover of “Bitches Ain’t Shit,” and getting involved in the murky world of college a cappella groups – a strange development for the man with the worst voice on alt-rock radio. The band’s back, with an album on the way, and Folds is clearly in a different place than in 1999. But is it progress? The subject matter is vague but inferrably grim; the overall mood, though, is maudlin. Folds’ vocal melody is pretty enough, but circles obsessively for the entirely of the song; Robert Sledge’s fuzz-bass takes a trunkseat to Robert Sledge’s soppy synthesized strings. (Darren Jessee is still getting by on the cod-martial snare work.) Having finally and laudably shed a Klostermaniacal concern with authenticity, taste and regionalism, BFF has instead latched onto the traumas of childhood. “Fetid memories/unworthy of a song” is the defense of a songwriter who doesn’t know better. Surely Folds knows anything is — and has been — up for grabs.
[4]

Jer Fairall: Robert Sledge’s warm, fuzzy, slobbering Saint Bernard of a bass was the thing I missed the most when Ben Folds dropped the Five, so I was a tad disappointed at first when this turned out to be a string laden ballad of the sort Folds has been doing for years on his own. But Folds hasn’t written a narrative this striking since the non-title tracks of Rockin’ The Suburbs, the site of some unnamed trauma deemed “unworthy of a song” but, therapy and dream-purging having failed him, which he remains far too haunted by to not revisit in the only way he knows how. I do wish he’d had a little more faith in the core trio upon this staging of a comeback single, rather than decorating it with so much orchestration, but there’s no denying that the words have cast a spell that, only a week of having lived with the song, I cannot seem to shake.
[8]

Alfred Soto: Piano! Adjectives like “feted”! Serious songwriting — that’s what our Ben aspires to. Like Joe Jackson, Billy Joel, and Elvis Costello, though, the man’s vaunted sensitivity sounds callow and received. It’s creepy that this man so admires Elton John but finds kitsch beneath him. Almost as creepy: apparently Ben’s band sports a bassist. Really?
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: A third of this is the sort of immaculate piano/string/choral arrangement The Sing-Off‘s singer-offers swoon for, another third’s vulnerable like the Weakerthans, and the last third’s whiny pap Kate Bush prematurely demolished in the ’80s. Which makes two-thirds of this OK.
[6]