Ben Kweller brings pop back to its roots

It seems that the gods are angry at pop music. Since its inception in the early 1960's, pop has been blown far off its course by powerful winds, and the genre is now hopelessly shipwrecked on an island populated by bland boy bands and whining sirens.

But hark! What's that in the distance? Sha sha, sha doo . . . La la-la la-la . . . Bah bah bah bah bah baaaaaah! Can it be true? Have the gods finally smiled down upon pop and set it back on its rightful course?

Maybe they have. The growing popularity of Ben Kweller, a 20-year-old Texan with shaggy hair, a penchant for nonsense syllables, and some serious guitar and keyboard skills, is evidence that the gods may, at long last, allow pop to end its perilous journey and return safe and sound to its origins, nonsense syllable choruses and all.

Saturday night, Kweller played a sold-out show at the Paradise Rock Club that embodied the sweet, carefree spirit of old-school Pop music.

The Paradise was crowded with college students, groups of swooning teenage girls, and a minority of concert goers who were actually old enough to buy drinks at the bar. There were so many shaggy-haired, vintage t-shirt-clad boys in the crowd that when I actually spotted Ben Kweller (talking with the people at the merch table), I figured he was just another fan.

The college and high school students stood packed together on the dance floor, while the 21-and-over crowd kept to the back of the venue, closer to the bar/lounge area and further from the excited squeals of Kweller's less mature fans.

Everyone was anxious to hear Ben Kweller perform, and this eagerness was apparent in the shouts that greeted the opening act, the Spaceshots. As soon as they took the stage, audience members screamed "We want BEN!" and, perhaps even more discouragingly, "Freebird!"

The Spaceshots managed to overcome this initial cold welcome, and the crowd seemed to enjoy the first few songs they played. Their song lyrics relied mainly on distorted cliches, which worked better in some cases ("The spy who loved me/ The spy who left me") than in others ("For the love of company/ I'm giving up on misery"). The lead singer had a versatile voice that ranged from soft and plaintive to a punk snarl, and the drummer's insistent, driving beats helped pull the many of the songs together.

By the sixth Spaceshots song, however, a few people were still nodding their heads to the beat, but most of the audience seemed to be getting bored. Three songs later, shouts of "Where's BEN?" bid the Spaceshots farewell.

After a brief intermission, Ben Kweller and his band took the stage. The audience screamed with excitement, and the swooning high school girls swooned. Kweller sat down at the keyboard in the middle of the stage, surrounded by a guitarist, bassist, and drummer, and played the opening notes of his hit single "How It Should Be (Sha Sha)," which, of course, inspired another round of screaming and swooning. Everyone sang along, belting out the incredibly catchy chorus.

He followed "How It Should Be" with two other crowd-pleasers, "Launch Ramp," a fast song with bouncy "Doo doo doo/ Doo doo doo" refrain, and "Wasted and Ready," which crescendoed into thrashing Pinkerton-era Weezer-style rock after a quiet beginning.

After the third song, his band left the stage and Kweller picked up an acoustic guitar and played "Panamanian Girl," a slow lovesong. Kweller's band returned to play a number of slower numbers, including "Family Tree," a folk song, and "Falling," a piano ballad that legitimizes the comparisons that are often drawn between Ben Kweller and Ben Folds.

The Paradise is a fairly large venue, but it still manages to be an intimate space. During the show, people in the front row rested their arms on the speakers at the base of the stage, and after Kweller finished "Falling," various fans handed him presents: a handmade card, a Burger King french fry box (with his initials, BK, emblazoned on it), and a green beaded bracelet, which he wore for the rest of the show.

Kweller revisited the straight-out rock of his opening numbers with "Harriet's Got a Song" and "Commerce, TX." The song, which is, all in all, an enjoyable song, but which contains lyrics so embarrassingly bad ("My brain is super-fried/ It involves pain to look inside") that I'm really hoping Kweller somehow intended them to be "ironic." (It involves pain to look inside? He sounds like a non-native English speaker. Or an angsty eighth-grader at open mike night at Starbucks.)

Then Kweller played a new song, "Hospital," which had a playful "La la la/ la la-la la-la" refrain that wouldn't have sounded out of place on a Raffi cassette, and lyrics as straightforwardly romantic ("Give me some time/ To get on your mind") as Please Please Me-era Beatles material. Nobody knew the song well enough to sing along this time, but I have a feeling that "Hospital" will quickly become a crowd favorite.

After he finished the song, Kweller said goodnight and left the stage, but, after a moment, he moonwalked back out for an encore. He played a few of his more folk-influenced songs unaccompanied on his acoustic guitar, and then his band joined him for one last rock song, "No Reason," whose chorus contains the almost unforgivably saccharine line "There's no reason, reason to cry."

But somehow, in Kweller's hands, the words "There's no reason, reason to cry" don't seem forced or offensively sweet. There's no pretension in his music. He writes earnestly happy songs that are intelligent but not profound - - 1960's-style Pop songs. And like his songs, his concerts are about having a good time, about jumping up and down and singing along to the Doo/ Doo doo doo! parts.