The gods of power pop are perennially unkind. Sure, it's never been music's most commercially viable subgenre, but I suspect an element of cosmic doom, too. Bios of the guys who've devoted entire careers to multi-tracked harmonies, anthemic choruses, and Pete Townshend windmills all seem to take the shape of rocketships cocked for the moon but fatefully, eternally stalled on the launch pad. Michigan-born Brendan Benson's no exception. His best record, 1996's One Mississippi-- the one that was supposed to launch him into the alt-rock stratosphere-- has one of those classic mid-1990s major label tales: Virgin Records didn't hear a hit and made him re-record it, scrimped on the promotional backing once he did, and promptly dropped him when the record failed to chart. Though Benson found relative success playing second fiddle to Jack White in the Raconteurs in the mid-aughts, this initial bummer seems to have set the tone for his career; his four solo albums of energetic, serviceable power pop have flown under most people's radars.
His fifth, What Kind of World, finds him playing the rock'n'roll loser once again, and occasionally meriting the Alex Chilton haircut he sports on its cover. "Here it goes again/ Another losing streak," he drawls on "Bad For Me", the pleasantly melodic if aurally nondescript lead-off single, "Guess I'm on a roll." On the more keyed-up title track, he barks a similarly discouraged refrain, "What kind of world/ Would take me apart/ Before I can start?" As that lyric (in addition to plenty others) implies, Benson is not the sort of writer who makes very deep dives into the ol' rhyming dictionary. But he possesses a knack for melody-- and even more importantly, a dutiful belief in the cathartic potential of an explosive chorus-- that usually renders his barebones lyrics forgivable. Indebted to songwriters like Todd Rundgren, Chilton, and occasionally Elvis Costello (there's a mod-ish, "Watching the Detectives" quality to tracks like the shuffle-footed "Keep Me"), Benson's melodies aim for timelessness rather than cling to any identifiable trends.
Even in its brighter moments, though, What Kind of World makes it no easier to pick Benson out of a Scraggly-Haired Dude With a Guitar police line-up (hint: Ben Kweller's probably the one in the dumb hat). Benson has never exactly been Mr. Personality, but his early records were not without the sort of eccentric charms of songs like the goofy Brit-inspired ditty "Tea". His thematic concerns have matured since his days of writing songs like One Mississippi's "Maginary Girl": World tracks like the piano-driven closer "On the Fence" candidly explore its narrator's reluctance to commit to a stable relationship ("Never been the type to want to settle down/ But never had the nerve to ramble on").
Still, largely devoid of lyrical texture and detail, the universe conjured by World often feels bland to a fault. "I can't decide on this way or another/ So I live my life just sitting on this fence," Benson sings on that closer; if only it didn't feel like such a fitting theme song for What Kind of World. Failing to assert a distinct identity, over the course of the song Benson instead enumerates the things he's not: "a lover," "a fighter"-- and in the end, he doesn't even really own the loser epithet either: The record feels too well-mannered to express much genuine disappointment or rage. Which makes World feel like a missed opportunity more than anything else: When you're already the loser, what else have you got to lose?
