TORONTO -- It was hard not to admire the unholy racket the wee minstrels in Ben Folds Five managed to pummel out at the Warehouse Tuesday night. Unfortunately, it was also tough to make out much in the way of tunes. For if ever there was a band worst suited to the cavernous lakeside venue, it's the Chapel Hill, N.C., trio, with their vaunted baby-grand piano and baby-grandiose songs of detached irony. Leader Folds played the proverbial scatology out of tunes culled from his group's 1997 album Whatever And Ever Amen and the current Unauthorized Biography Of Reinhold Messner. Some 1,500 fans, meanwhile, strained to hear their favourite Folds witticisms ricochet off the club's back wall. Somewhere in the din lay a solid enough gig, the band ditching the trying goofiness of previous Toronto visits in favour of taut, rumbling singalongs and un-hinged harmonies. Folds still managed to get big laughs with readings from a prank horoscope -- "Taurus: You are impossible to like and a communist ... Gemini: People like you because you are bisexual," etc. Ben Folds Five also dropped by Metalworks studio Monday to lay down a version of Steely Dan's Barrytown. The song will turn up next year on the soundtrack for the Jim Carrey film Me, Myself & Irene.