How do the following lyrics make you feel?

‘I died in ‘Frisco at The Stones/ I died with Paul at the time of Abbey Road/ Sid Vicious and I will never grow old.’ Do they make you want to laugh hysterically at their clunky pretentiousness? I did. But then a minute later, I was confronted with ‘I was with Diana in the back of the car’, and I realized that not even David Brent at his most cringingly ignorant could write such a song. Das Ben is taking the piss, from the kiddy punk acoustic guitar to the deadpan humour in the lyrics. My favourite line in the entire EP is from Planet Me: ‘He said you only need three chords so I wrote it with four’. What else do you want, huh?

I’m going to let you in on a secret: I’ve never seen him live. But I’m pretty sure that Ben’s a fucking funny guy with a keen ear for the ridiculous and a rather good wit. I’d put money on him being a gazillion times better live than he comes off here. Not that this is bad. It’s just that the production is scratchy and hollow-sounding, and I can’t escape the niggling feeling that the man live would surely add up to more than this one-dimensional debut. Das Ben has been playing his brand of acoustic punk since 2002, and has a devout fan base. That is why I’m suspicious that this has missed the mark. A man who happily refers to himself as ‘Lou Reed on an OK day,’ and trades in a mixture of play-school rhymes (‘we went to Midnight/ She ordered a flat white…we went to Civic Square/ she said why are we here?’) and anti-corporate witticisms is the kind of man I want to spend an evening with, not his pale shade. God, I’ve got to get out more.