Ben Kweller is like Peter Pan. He's nice and pleasant, and can sort of make you feel like a child yourself. Except Peter Pan never got older, and Ben Kweller seems to be getting younger.
No, wait. He can't be Peter Pan. He's 23. Ben Kweller is a songwriter. And, despite what might've before seemed like promise, he's not a very good one.
Ben Kweller, the songwriter, is pretty easy to figure out. His signature turns of phrase are just that; he'll take a cliché, move the words around a bit, and all of a sudden, he's the Yogi Berra of sanitized pop rock. He's clearly spent a lot of time with his Pavement records (in fact, he owes pretty much everything he's got to the faux-inanity of the classic "Cut Your Hair"). But whereas Stephen Malkmus made messy, language-infused rock, Kweller (now, anyway) is just messy.
But Ben Kweller, the little boy who never grew up? Appropriate, but a bit tougher to understand. His breakthrough, 2002's Sha Sha, was charmingly dopey, revealing its melodies through Kweller's naïve songcraft. But whereas the Ben Kweller who made Sha Sha seemed a little too talented to seem so childlike, On My Way, his latest album, proves that maybe Ben really is the goofy kid he'd always hinted at. And, as it turns out, real goofy kids don't make good rock records.
Kweller's sound hasn't changed much since his last time out; he's still all about the power chords and staying fairly light on the distortion, with a few piano ballads sprinkled here and there to switch things up. It's a nice enough change to hear some rock not dressed up in synth, but the arrangements have been dumbed down to their most rudimentary state, leaving Ben with little to fall back on when his lyrics fail to engage. If Sha Sha was pleasantly stripped-down, On My Way is musical regression, the sound of a guy forgetting how to play his guitar and pressing on anyway.
Bland backing tracks aside, Kweller's penchant for writing a clever couplet has given way to an entire album's worth of anonymous, rushed lyrics, leaving On My Way without a leg to stand on. The rickety "Hospital Bed" is fun enough, I guess, and "give me some time to get on your mind" is a wonderfully obvious hook. But "My Apartment" is actually about Ben's apartment, and I'm at a loss why anyone should care (hasn't he heard "In My Room"?). "The Rules" has a nice swagger to it, and "Believer" has that "In the Still of the Night" vibe in spades. But Kweller's "too clever to be good" schtick wears thin after a while, particularly when he's not even all that clever anymore. There's just nothing here to get excited about; whatever made Sha Sha such brain-dead fun packed up and left On My Way, leaving Kweller with, well, nothing.
On My Way is pretty much 40 minutes of mush-mouthed punk-pop, played with as little engagement as possible. This is nerd-rock without a very good nerd at the helm, and that, not surprisingly, doesn't work. For fans of Sha Sha, On My Way isn't too shabby, provided you don't listen too closely. But for everyone else, On My Way is a bad record by an OK artist, and unless Ben figures out how to grow up a little bit, his young man's blues are going to fall on a lot of deaf ears.
