[review 2006: the odds and ends]

Jenny Lewis lost me the first time I saw the video for “Rise Up With Fists!!”

If you’ve never seen the video, take a look. If you have, let me explain. For whatever reason, I can’t track down the third version of this video, but they’re all essentially the same except for the opening line—it’s Sarah Silverman saying either “With a twist of lemon,” “Lemonade!” or “Semen!” (guess which version I couldn’t find). In any case, it’s followed up with an asinine laugh track and all the band members pretending to laugh hysterically. The whole video is essentially a play on Hee Haw (fun fact: Hee Haw was on the air until 1992!). You can tell by the costumes, the set and the random spurts of canned laughter. Oh, and about halfway through the piece, all of the band give the camera the good ol’ knowing wink, but it’s an especially knowing wink that says, “yeah, we know even this knowing wink is cliche, and we’re letting you know that we know!” Yes, we’re being Ironic! Hur-fucking-ray. But why wink to the camera at all? It all seems completely out of place.

No one was ever going to mistake Jenny Lewis for a genuine country singer, as if that really means a whole lot these days. After all, mainstream country has only recently abandoned the abhorrence that was New Country (and arguably vestiges still remain), and one of the leading lights of the alt-country scene is none other than Neko Case, whose career bears many similarities to Lewis’s. They both began in bands playing music in a different genre (Case with Vancouver punk band Maow, Lewis with Rilo Kiley), they both started singing solo while with said band, and they both had trouble initially gaining acceptance as a legitimate country artist. Case went on to perform on the stage of the Grand Ol’ Opry, though in typical Neko Case fashion she got kicked out for stripping down to her bra (Case claims it was heatstroke, a far less exciting version than the apocryphal tale). But kicked out or no, Case doesn’t have to worry very much about not being taken seriously as a country artist or a singer-songwriter. So legitimacy shouldn’t be a problem; if a punk drummer can make it, so can Jenny Lewis.

And she’s off to a decent start; the one-two opening punch of “The Big Guns” and “Rise Up With Fists!!” is promising, even if the video for “Rise Up With Fists!!” isn’t. And while the remainder of the album begins to settle into a slight malaise, it’s mainly because the songs aren’t quite up to snuff and the sound isn’t varied enough to compensate. The gospel stylings of the Watson Twins are fantastic, but over the course of a whole album the impact dulls a bit. Same with the spitshine polish on all the tracks—very pretty, but very consistently pretty, consistent to a fault. It’s an easy album to listen to, but not enough of it sticks. Lewis has better luck with the slower songs like “Melt Your Heart” and “Rabbit Fur Coat,” but the upbeat tracks aren’t all that memorable.

In the end, the problem is not that Jenny Lewis is having a hard time getting others to accept her as a country singer; she does a good enough job of that, though no one is going to accord her the same credentials as a Loretta Lynn or a Dolly Parton. The problem is she seems reluctant to embrace the label herself. You can hear it best in “Handle With Care,” which is not only the closest the album comes to sounding like Rilo Kiley, but is also the track where Lewis is joined by her other indie-rock friends like Ben Gibbard and Conor Oberst. And there’s something slightly odd about pairing up with the Watson Twins for your first solo album; for a woman whose voice is near-universally praised, was it absolutely necessary to have two more angelic voices behind her? Not that it was a bad choice—clearly it wasn’t—but it’s like the golden-era New York Yankees paying off the other team to lose the World Series.

Granted, these are all small signs, and I may be reading too much into it. But then there’s the video for “Rise Up With Fists!!” At first it seemed just a bit offensive to me, though I easily take offense at imagined wrongdoings. It seemed like she was laughing at the very country tradition she set out to join, like she was somehow above it all. Now I’m not so sure about that interpretation; after all, she seems fairly invested in her material throughout the album, and the song itself is bereft of the knowing winks the video provides. In fact, the video is an odd choice for what is actually quite a beautiful song. It’s almost as if Lewis was trying to tell you not to take any of it seriously—the laugh track, the knowing winks, Sarah Silverman—almost as if Lewis didn’t quite trust her material to stand on its own merits.