The trouble with being a child prodigy, Ben Kweller's new record suggests, is you might grow old faster than everybody else, too. In 1997, when the Texas singer-songwriter was only 15, The New Yorker chronicled the major-label bidding war for his alternative rock band Radish, en route to an appearance on Late Show With David Letterman, European tours, and a commercially disappointing debut album. By 2002, at only age 20, he was living in Brooklyn and making a modestly successful comeback, with the shaggy yet sweetly melodic pop of solo debut Sha Sha, a charming distillation of influences from Weezer and Ben Folds Five.
A Ben Folds Five reunion album is on the way, and Weezer's echoes live on in more recent bands such as Surfer Blood and Yuck, but Go Fly a Kite has remarkably little to say about the present. After Sha Sha, Kweller sanded away some of his endearing idiosyncrasies for 2004's more straightforward On My Way, an approach he took further on 2006's Ben Kweller, before decamping back to Texas and trying his hand at alt-country on 2009's Changing Horses. It's silly to quibble over which is best, though, because it seems like a pretty good bet that any fan's favorite Kweller album is whichever one you heard first. Accordingly, Kweller's latest solo full-length, his first to be independently released-- on his own Noise Company label-- brings it all back home, resulting in a retrenchment that's as understandable as it is frustrating.
Kweller's impeccably competent craftsmanship is not in dispute. The Steve Miller-tinged Southern rock of "Free" builds toward a bluesy guitar solo exactly where it should, despite being unwilling to deploy an F-bomb, and the Wall of Sound-scaling "Jealous Girl" packs in enough references-- 1950s pop, Bruce Springsteen, the Cars, John Lennon's "Jealous Guy"-- for a Girl Talk meta-mp3 binge. Even in the album's lesser songs, such as piano ballad "The Rainbow", country-tinged weeper "I Miss You", or tempo-shifting organ rocker "Justify Me", evidence of Kweller's 15 years putting songs together professionally is on full display. If pastiche means "speech in a dead language," then Kweller is a fluent practitioner.
For an album that includes the guitar chords for every song in its packaging so you can play along at home, however, Go Fly a Kite sure is coy when it comes to memorable hooks or lyrical detail-- particularly when compared to Kweller's past songs "Wasted and Ready", "Lizzy", or Guster collaboration "I Hope Tomorrow Is Like Today". On the waltzing piano-popper "Gossip", we get portentous guitar arpeggios that recall the Beatles' "I Want You (She's So Heavy)", but little to talk about beyond the observation that gossip is "gonna get you down." The Pavement-ragged lurch of "Time Will Save the Day" contains the following opaque revelation: "I went through the fortress, I slept with the mistress/ I read through the Bible, it gave me revival." Which tells us... something. Kweller never makes a mistake, but he never does anything here risky enough to be considered a mistake, either.
The most disappointing aspect of Go Fly a Kite is that it sounds so satisfied, almost smug, in its complacency. At 30, Kweller and I are the same age, and we're both fathers, but I'd rather keep chasing our ever-evolving pop culture and risk looking silly than dig in and try to hold onto my 20-year-old self (who, it must be said, could be a total ignorant asshole sometimes). "Don't regret anything I ever did," Kweller insists in John Lennon double-track on scorching new-wave opener "Mean to Me", adding, "'Cause I always knew where I was coming from." Well, that makes one of us.
"I've come full circle," Kweller futher declares over the CSNY-style folk of "Full Circle", which could easily have been the album's title. By jaunty back-porch closer "You Can Count on Me", though, it's unclear whether Kweller has learned anything along the way, or whether he's just back where he started from-- without the youthful impulsiveness that made him likable to begin with: "It's a sad day 'cause all my old friends have changed/ I just want you to know that I'm still the same," he promises. Well, fuck that, Kwell-dog. As a much older, forever-young man once sang, "He not busy being born is busy dying." An even better title for Go Fly a Kite would've been Get Off My Lawn.
