Despite a handful of noble efforts, dude-next-door Ben Kweller seems destined to spend the remainder of his career attempting to claw his way out of little brotherdom. Blame his goofy guitar stomps, moppish locks and toothy grin, or the enduring legacy of an infamously anticlimactic high school gig (the heavily hyped, quickly forgotten Radish), but know that Ben Kweller is having a crap of a time escaping our distracted head-pats and condescending smiles. Check standard Kweller-crit protocol: The elders glance and chortle, crinkle their noses, dub him "adorable!" or "a wunderkind," and then proceed with white-knuckled noogies.
Never mind that Kweller's scrappy, Violent Femmes-ish alt-rock is not really all that different from what his aged peers (see Evan Dando, Ben Folds) perpetually crank out, or that he's married, and 23, and two records into a fairly successful recording career. Somehow, it still feels far more appropriate to hide his bicycle in the bushes and play the infuriating Wayne to Kweller's sheepish Kevin Arnold. Maturity, then, is Kweller's shiny-haired Winnie Cooper: elusive, confounding, and perpetually out of reach.
Kweller's latest, On My Way, takes a gallant stab at adulthood, toning down the slappy bursts and over-energized slams, and simultaneously erasing all the awkward, bumbling charm (comparing sex to eating spaghetti?) that made us notice him in the first place. Mostly, Kweller's very-well-intentioned efforts have simply led to an unfortunate critical snafu: Record reviewers have long chastised Kweller for his naivete, but those same folks will probably frown when faced with Kweller's loaded, listless shot at the big kids' table. On My Way is a far less goofy effort than 2002's Sha Sha, and suffers remarkably for its comparable lack of inanity-- no longer powered by the youthful glee of his solo debut, Kweller's hooks sag and fade, contrived and loose. Like countless twenty-somethings hovering on the cusp on self-realization, Kweller's grasps at actualization fall just a little bit short, inadvertently positioning his younger flailings as the far more attractive choice.
"Hospital Bed" sees Kweller returning to the depths of his well-pilfered Beatles collection, channeling the (irritatingly plucky) spirit of Bens cohort Ben Folds, mixing in twinkly piano bits and octave-jumping vocals; it's the closest Kweller comes to recreating Sha Sha's cocky charisma, with hyperactive la-la-la's and pounding electric guitar. Kweller's boyish vocals, which have always felt vaguely unhinged, work best when singing absurd, yelpy love songs to his stuff-- see his tender ode to his cat-filled Brooklyn apartment: "My apartment/ The home where I hide/ Away from all the darkness outside/ I'm there all the time." Kweller mixes in some sweet acoustic ballads (the title song is an unassuming acoustic monument to his girl: "She makes hats with her hands/ She is such an artist/ I'm her biggest fan/ And I'm teaching her to sing"), but his folky promises are still far less convincing than his leg-flailing, adolescent rockers, like "The Rules".
Ben Kweller is clearly trying hard to do the right thing-- to grow up, brush off, evolve. But On My Way-- as its title so brazenly suggests-- is also unforgivably transitory. Subsequently, the record becomes an oddly limp testament to Kweller's newfound inertia, and listeners are left feeling a little empty-nested.
