Immediately on the Only Children's second album, Josh Berwanger makes his frustrations known: over a determined Stones riff on "Tired of this Town", the former Anniversary frontman and indie lifer sings, "Tired of being wrong/ Tired of singing songs/ Tired of not acting my age." The nine songs that follow on Keeper of Youth elaborate on his disappointments, some of which are well founded, others a little tiresome. Certainly Berwanger and his band are entitled to them: he's been making music for nearly a decade, a once-hyped artist surpassed by many subsequent flavors-of-the-month and now an outsider proud of his flyover-state heritage. The Kansas-based Only Children express this wizened anomie with a bar-band ethos that glorifies immediate riffs, unpretentious lyrics, chorus hooks that make a virtue of predictability, and the mournful country flourish of pedal steel. It's classic rock freighted with punk dissent.
The Only Children make it work often on Keeper of Youth, but their mission gets the better of them. The melodramatic strings on the title track and the convincing reggae rhythms of "Hide Your Sorrow" fare much better than the ridiculous gospel posturing of "Amen Amen". Heidi-Lynne Gluck's feminine vocals nicely complement Berwanger's howl on "Invisible Streets" and the quiet closer "Blackheart of Life". "1969" starts with a near-perfect rock couplet: "Said you were leavin'/ And then you stole my car," but Berwanger screws it up almost immediately: "Said you'd feel a whole lot better/ Drivin' some place [wait for it] far."
The reigning tone of Keeper of Youth is prideful nostalgia. Berwanger glories in looking backwards for inspiration and guidance, but he too readily buys into classic rock myths that should have faded away when baby boomers started subscribing to Modern Maturity. "What happened to the spirit of rock and roll/ I guess it died a long time ago," he sings on "Invisible Streets". "But that ain't true/ Do you remember Dylan and the Rolling Stones, Muddy Waters and the Ramones..." Please, tell us more about these good ol' days when music mattered. "Dusty Magazines" wants it both ways: after lambasting critics, Berwanger bitches about record labels whose next-big-thing tunnel vision has generated so much crappy music. But he's just preaching to the choir. A truly controversial statement illustrates how readily the Only Children would change places with the popular bands: "My band's got what it takes/ But we just can't catch a break." It'd probably be heartbreaking if it didn't sound so self-pitying.
Keeper of Youth recalls another state-of-the-indie-career album: the Wrens' Meadowlands, a wrenching collection of songs about lives wasted in the indie trenches. The comparison is instructive and the artists' frustrations similarly sympathetic, but instead of playing like their live(lihood)s depend on it, the Only Children sound like they're retreating into their record collection. Even though their bitterness was more acute, the Wrens' frustrations felt more universal, to the extent that Meadowlands perfectly expresses every thirty-year-old's sense of time wasted and opportunities lost. Keeper of Youth, on the other hand, sounds like the Only Children are too tired to see beyond themselves.
