Brendon Benson article in today's L.A. Weekly:
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/printme.php?eid=42048

Bryan

P.S. Wonder how much 'Lapalco' cost to record? (one
of my Top Ten from last year)

Here's an excerpt:

Tiny Sparks
Brendan Benson's pop nutrition
by Sorina Diaconescu
Looks vulnerable, but he
won't break


TOWARD BRENDAN BENSON - SON OF NEW
ORLEANS, Detroit and L.A., silversmith of insanely
addictive pop songs and possibly the most talented
troubadour of the moment - you feel protective. Not
that the man himself is some kind of hothouse flower,
but when you get down to writing about his music, you
have this impulse to hold back the familiar clichés, ignore
the itch to speak in fake tongues. For his sake, you chuck
the calculated turns of phrase (to hell with the "crunchy
guitars," the "synth bleeps" and the "power-pop tunes"!)
and instead get back to the source - to the Old Man
River, to the memory of that first kiss - because that is
what his songs conjure up, paradoxically enough, given
that they always seem to be about a guy who's a little
shy and spends too much of the day in his own head.
Brendan Benson inspires that kind of rebellion: You
want to be beautiful, clean and simple, like his songs.

Although singer-songwriters have never been in short
supply, what Benson has to offer has become a rare
commodity in an age when pop music is by definition
slick, ironic, surgically enhanced in studio labs, equally
bloated and thinned down to nothingness. The proof
is last year's Lapalco, the six-years-in-the-making
follow-up to Benson's beautiful but cursed debut, One
Mississippi. Amid the crap packaged as pop music
these days, Lapalco is both shockingly out of place
and instantly familiar, like a fuzzy cashmere blanket you
might find on sale at Target. The numbers that punch it
up (the single "Tiny Spark," or the raucous "Folk Singer")
stick like glue after only one listen. Balls of unbearably
catchy harmonies, they burrow into the pit of your
stomach, whence they continue to glow and warm you
through the hours and days to come. The slower tracks
("Life in the D," "Metarie") sneak up on you, too. Right
when you think it's safe to write them off as another
singer-songwriter attempt at cheesy melancholy, they
flail back to punch you in the gut.

(there's more)