Kid rock!

Ben Lee, Radish, and Hanson
are teenagers in love

by Stephanie Zacharek

This is a love chain letter. Within 5 days you must send it to 27 other teens. On the 5th day a person you like will ask you out, or tell you that they love you. If you do not send it you will have problems in future relationships. It has been going since 1877 and hasn't stopped since.

-- chain letter circulated among preteens and teenagers via e-mail

Ben was up there with braces and this angelic face, but the songs were finished adult compositions. There was a youthfulness, a joyousness, about Ben that was very exciting.

-- Danny Goldberg, president of Mercury Records, on seeing Ben Kweller of Radish perform, as quoted in the New Yorker

Ah, the youthfulness, the joyousness, of adolescent love and desire! It is, as Danny Goldberg would probably be quick to point out, very exciting. And if you can find a way to package and sell finished adult compositions about said love and desire, you just may be on your way to big money.

At least that seems to be Goldberg's hope for Radish, a Texas-based band led by 15-year-old Ben Kweller who sound suspiciously like another Nirvana being led by an, uh, 15-year-old. (The Radish hype was the subject of an April New Yorker article.) It's telling, or maybe it isn't, that of three recent releases by performers under age 20 -- Radish's Restraining Bolt (Mercury), Hanson's Middle of Nowhere (also Mercury), and Ben Lee's Something To Remember Me By (Grand Royal) -- it's Restraining Bolt that smells the least like teen spirit. With its humorless songs and scalpel-precise execution, it's exactly the kind of well-crafted crap kids should be discouraged from making these days.

The truth is, though, that even when it's used as a marketing ploy, the idea of rock and roll made by actual youngsters is immensely appealing to a lot of us. Some people would argue that we become so desensitized as we get older that we eventually have trouble even remembering what it was like to fall in love, and so we need teenage pop to help us reclaim our own faded memories. It's as if we wanted to remake the whole concept of "the teenage years" into a kind of emotional petting zoo, where we're free to fuss and coo over our younger, more tender selves.

But if you believe that love can hit you hard at any age, then seeking out songs written by 15-year-olds is simply another way to recharge your batteries. Plenty of people don't get around to writing about their teenage experiences of love and romance until they're well into their 20s, and the good ones can continue to capture the intensity of youthful love well into their 40s and 50s (Elvis Costello, Van Morrison). By the same token, why shouldn't we be eager to hear what a talented 15-year-old has to say on the subject, someone who's only recently entered the trenches? Anybody who might be able to shed a little light on the whole befuddling experience should get at least one shot.

If they're Australian singer/ songwriter Ben Lee (who graduated from high school only within the past few months), they should get at least a couple. Lee's first solo disc, 1995's Grandpaw Would, and much of his work with the now-disbanded Noise Addict navigated the terrain of young love with astonishing subtlety and lots of goofball grace. Something To Remember Me By, his latest, proves that he hasn't shot his load; he was a good songwriter to begin with, and to his credit he's still learning.

There are a few rough patches. On "Gramercy Park Hotel," Lee reflects, with annoying earnestness, on a night spent hanging out with some unnamed famous rock-and-roll types in a hotel room late at night. "We were young, not so young, and in love with our lives/3 a.m. in New York, I went back to bed/Three lone true prophets with songs in our heads," he sings against a backdrop of sensitive-dude acoustic strumming.

But when Lee focuses on what it's like to be a kid in love, he never goes wrong. On the charming acoustic ballad "Eight Years Old," he ruminates about reconnecting, at 17, with his first love, whom he lost when he was eight. What's amazing here is the way he makes his remembrance of that pain sound completely believable. Sure, we all feel things pretty intensely at 17, but even at eight we're capable of romantic feelings we're hard-pressed to explain, or wave away. "I'd be lying if I said I was not devastated and broken/When she opened my hand, slid hers in, then walked away," Lee sings, without condescending to the idea that an eight-year-old couldn't possibly know what love is. When he sees her again, "almost a decade later, a decade too late," the wound reopens. "Eight Years Old" is a reminder that children can have secret lives, and secret loves, that they carry with them forever.

On the other hand, if Radish's Restraining Bolt is any indication, Ben Kweller doesn't have an honest bone in his body --not yet, anyway. His songwriting "prowess" consists of reworking Nirvana-esque chord changes and writing lyrics that he's sure will bite hard and kick ass. With the exception of "My Guitar," a pleasant-enough pop ditty that gets some energy from Kweller's just-goofing-around surf-guitar diddling, every song on Restraining Bolt has serious rock attitude smeared all over it. The first single, "Little Pink Stars," has a chorus that reaches out and grabs you, but Kweller's twisted, tortured guitar only sounds strained and contrived: he wants to be Kurt Cobain so badly you can taste it. (Which makes Goldberg's championing of the band that much more disconcerting. Goldberg, formerly Nirvana's manager, was considered a close friend of Cobain's.) "Dear Aunt Arctica" is probably a serious message song about intolerance and depravity. You can deduce this from the lines "The whole world's waitin' for their dance with Satan/The KKK is in town, the Ku Klux Klan is in town." Heavy, dude.

This shouldn't be a fun job, trashing a little kid's first LP: but then, if an album's big selling point is that it's been made by a surprisingly astute 15-year-old, there's no reason I have to say, "Give the poor guy a break, he's only 15!" Instead of making excuses for kids who don't yet know what they're doing, I'd much rather stand up and holler for three who obviously do: Hanson, a trio of brothers from Tulsa.

The sound of Hanson's debut, Middle of Nowhere, is shamelessly derivative of the pop music some of us knew and loved in the late '60s and early '70s: the obvious comparison, when you hear Hanson's breathy, teen-angel, cracked-soul vocals, is the Jackson Five, but embarrassingly enough for me, as I listened I managed to conjure a remnant of the DeFranco Family's "Heartbeat, It's a Love Beat" from my own hoary memory bank. Who are these kids? They're either true geniuses or extremely talented mimics, and maybe both; they're copying something so hopelessly out of fashion that they've remade it their own, which takes a kind of genius in itself.

Slick as it is, Middle of Nowhere still sounds very much like an album made by teenagers. All three of the Hansons -- Isaac, Taylor, and Zac -- sing, and the songs seem to slide right by on their buttery harmonies. (Taylor often sings lead.) The numbers have a lush, unabashedly commercial sound, built more around perky keyboards than guitar. "Look at You" is a dark, funky, twitchy little morsel about the boredom of hanging around a high-school dance waiting for something to happen -- and then not knowing what to do when something does: "She breaks the silence with a move of her hips/You better hang on, don't want to lose your grip." The acoustic ballad "Lucy" comes complete with swooping Beatles harmonies. "Yearbook" is the strangest song here, about a missing, possibly dead, classmate -- none of the kids know what happened to him, and the grown-ups seem to know but won't tell. "Yearbook" is so melodramatic, it's the kind of song you can get away with only if you're still in your teens. ("There's a lying in your silence, tell me where did Johnny go?") Yet it's laid out on such an irresistible groove that you find yourself sucked right into the mystery.

But the single "MMMBop" steals the show. It's a bubblegum dream, with its shamelessly bouncy bass line, its gleaming, twisting guitars, and a little cheerful scratching thrown in for good measure. "So hold onto the ones who really care/In the end they'll be the only ones there/When you get old and start losing your hair." You couldn't dream up sillier lyrics, and yet Hanson make them work, because they sing them as if they knew how high the stakes really are. There's no teenage apathy here, no indifference; in Hansonville, both the little pop ditty and the message wrapped up inside it mean everything. Looking for love, yearning for it, hanging onto it once you find it -- the world of romance isn't meant to be taken lightly. Forget self-serious posers like Ben Kweller. In the end, it's the seemingly silly kids who know how serious the game really is. Figuratively speaking, at least, Hanson wouldn't dream of breaking the chain.

Ben Lee comes to the Met Cafe this Friday, June 13.