Album: Ben Kweller

When he was 15, Ben Kweller's kiddy-grunge band Radish was signed up by Mercury Records in the immediate aftermath of the label's success with Hanson. Perhaps luckily for him, nothing much ever came of the opportunity. Though no longer a teenager, Kweller has managed to retain an appealing, ingenuous quality to his voice, while his music has broadened to admit a pleasing diversity of interests. The opening track, "How It Should Be (Sha Sha)", for instance, sounds like Ben Folds playing Brian Wilson, a well-crafted pop miniature neatly expressing Kweller's callow idealism: "Nothing isn't nothing; it's something that's important to me." There's a more folksy West Coast harmony approach to "Family Tree", which sounds like Poco playing Lennon's "I'm Only Sleeping" with the addition of an odd metaphor or two ("I have been finding/ I am the book/ And you are the binding"). But the dominant mode here remains the slacker grunge-pop style of Kweller's mentor Evan Dando, with fuzz-chords following a surprisingly melodic course to produce a Weezer-esque pop classic in the catchy "Wasted & Ready", an oddball assessment of attraction: "She is a slut, but X makes it sexy/ Sex reminds her of eating spaghetti." The interest flags a little in the album's latter stages, particularly on the drearily impassioned "Lizzy", but for most of the time Kweller displays an assured grasp of pop requisites, piling killer hook upon killer hook even when at his most raucous, and tying everything up with another neatly turned Wilsonian naïve-pop exercise, in "Falling". The geek-rock album of the year.