Examiner.com

Brendan Benson (ATO Records)

I like to think I was an early fan of Brendan Benson. I was down with BB long before he teamed up with Jack White in the Raconteurs…also before his songs “Life In The D” and “Tiny Spark” were used in car commercials (there may have been a third song/commercial pairing for a department store that I’m not remembering clearly). But if you knew the album One Mississippi when it came out, THEN you’ve got me beat.

I’ve always enjoyed Benson’s simple, pop-rock aesthetic (“simple” being a relative term…for if writing catchy songs were simple, why would someone pay Katy or Linda Perry to do it for them?). This summer he returns from the Raconteurs to supply us with his fourth solo album. It is called My Old, Familiar Friend and it’s more of the same…in the best possible sense. Some people (namely the bands themselves) like a band to grow and evolve, but how many bands outside the Beatles can pull off the transition from two-minute love songs to “I Am The Walrus”??? So stop trying. Give people what brought them to you in the first place. I think Brendan Benson is doing just that.

The disc opens with the single “A Whole Lot Better” featuring a nice driving hook about the ins and outs of love, along with some Ric Ocasek, Cars-esque guitar fills. Clocking in at a tidy 3:23 in length, “A Whole Lot Better” also sets the tone for the record…where only one song, “Lesson Learned”, breaks the four-minute mark. I’ve often noticed Benson seems to have a predilection towards the pop-rock bands of the late 70’s; Cars, ELO, perhaps Todd Rundgren...but the song “Garbage Day”, with it’s string orchestration and basic drumming, had more of the essence of Roy Orbison to it. Well, Roy Orbison song-writing. No one has Roy Orbison’s operatic voice or falsetto.

The midpoint of the set brings us “You Make A Fool Out Of Me”, a song that feels, lyrically, quite personal and revealing of Benson. It’s the quietest album to this point on the record, and it begins with much promise, but never seems to climb to where it felt it might go.

The same can’t be said of what is likely the best song on Familiar Friend, a bouncy, head-bopper called “Don’t Want To Talk”…a song for all the boys who often find that words can be a woman’s greatest weapon…a song that knows when a man opens his mouth he almost always inevitably gets a foot, or at least a toe, caught in it. Or maybe Benson just doesn’t want to lose an ear…an ear talked off by the target of his lyrics who doesn’t know that silence sometimes wins gold.

The album has a few more noteworthy cuts including “Gonowhere” and “Poised and Ready”, but my biggest complaint of Brendan Benson, in general, is the feeling that he writes some great songs, but to this point in his career he hasn’t written a great ALBUM. An album that is as good from front to back as the best of his singles have been. I was hopeful, after another solid start, that he might pull the trick here, but did not find that to be the case. It still betters most of the albums I’ve heard recently in terms of quality and quantity of good songs. I’m just splitting hairs hoping for a “perfect” record from Benson. It’s still good to hear the voice of an old familiar friend.