Ben Kweller

About this time last year, Ben Kweller — Brooklyn's greatest fake classic rocker not counting the Hold Steady — was shoving tampons up his nose trying to stop the bleeding. It was one of the more macabre scenes at the brutally hot Austin City Limits Festival. This week, when Kweller ventures into the packed and sweaty confines of Off Broadway, he'll bring a first-aid kit and a band that gets the piano-driven bounce, driving-wheel riffage and salt-of-the-earthiness that makes that rock classic to begin with. "I'm just a penny on the train tracks waiting for my judgment day," he sings on last year's under-appreciated self-titled album. Kweller is so earnest you sometimes want to hasten that day by pledging allegiance to nihilist terrorism, but it's way more fun to just bop along with him.