Ben Kweller is past 30 now, he even has children as he said during the show, but he still looks like a teenager with his long auburn curly hair surrounding his baby face. On Thursday night, he appeared on the Amoeba stage in the most humble manner, with a friendly hello, excusing himself for doing some soundcheck ‘he should have done earlier’.
I had lost his track a few years ago, but I remember really liking his song ‘The Rules’ that we were hearing quite a bit on the radio around 2004, with this line ‘I just want to belonnnnnng’ over some raw-youthful rock’ n’ roll which sounded so fresh and inspired.
He was doing an in-store to promote his last album ‘Go Fly a Kite’, just released two days before, and although he has never had a song close to a real hit, I could tell he has developed a loyal cult following, seeing all these girls singing the lyrics of the brand new songs. Sure he is not Lana Del Rey, who two days earlier had attracted more than 1,000 people in the store, but he has made music over a decade, and will we still be talking about LDR in a few years?
He started his rather long set with the opening song of the album, the electrifying ‘Mean to Me’, with a…. mean guitar and a power-pop soaring chorus, something quite recurrent in Kweller’s songs. The tune was rocking hard, offering its obvious influences from the Beatles to Tom Petty, and it was damn catchy at the first listening. Ben was not lacking any dynamism, even on the small Amoeba stage, he was doing some violent guitar strumming, rising his leg, his arm, playing like a true rocker, kicking up some distorsion.
From the new record, he and his band also played the excellent ‘Out of the Door’, a countrish song, which had a sort of Dylan-Wilco melody, revealing some astonishing familiarity without being unoriginal. Then, Ben switched to the keyboard for two songs, ‘Full Circle’, a gentle folkish Petty-esque ballad, and ‘Gossip’, a totally keyboard-driven waltz.
Of course they had to do old tunes, like ‘The Rules’, the Ben Fold Five-esque ‘Falling’, as he was mixing old with new, digging in his catalogue, in his 2004 ‘On My Way’, or his 2002 ‘Sha Sha’, going from soulful pop ballads to rocking numbers.
Back on guitar, the intro of ‘Jealous Girl’ with its ascending ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh before the chorus and the mix of power-chords and keyboard, had this latent E-street band potential, and it was rather amazing how Kweller’s sound was all over the music map, equally at ease with a dry-whipped country tune or a toe-tapping poppy song. But I would not want to give the impression his set was a collage of many genres, the upbeat and catchy harmonies, the tight sound and Kweller’s unassumingly cool and dynamic personality were unifying the music, effortlessly executed from start to finish.
Setlist
Mean to Me
I Need You Back
The Rules
Out the Door
Full Circle
Gossip
Falling
Sundress
Jealous Girl
Penny on the train track
Wasted and Ready