[review 2007: crimes and misdemeanours]

When Jenny Lewis tried her hand at a psuedo-solo album (hey, the Watson Twins don’t show up on the album cover for nothing), she seemed to have an idea of how it was all supposed to work out. I still have mixed feelings about Rabbit Fur Coat, but there’s no denying that a lot of people liked it—people who’d maybe never heard of Jenny Lewis before but decided they wanted to subscribe to her newsletter. And though minor elements of the album still feel a bit calculated (”let’s get my other indie friends to sing along on Handle With Care!”) Rabbit Fur Coat has done just as much for Jenny Lewis’s career as her years of service as the frontwoman for Rilo Kiley, if not more.

Not that Rilo Kiley was suffering from a lack of attention. Under the Blacklight may be Rilo Kiley’s biggest push into the major leagues—and the one with all the pressure, thanks to the band’s success and Lewis’s rising star—but it’s not their first. That honour goes to 2004’s More Adventurous, a Warner album in all but name (the band’s own imprint, Brute/Beaute, was used as the label of record instead). And though it wasn’t a tentative move away from Rilo Kiley’s landmark album The Execution of All Things, More Adventurous didn’t divide or alienate the band’s existing audience, either. The 50s genre exercise of “I Never” and the heightened melodrama of “Does He Love You?” and “Love And War (11/11/46)” were slicker and more ambitious songs, but they felt like natural products of a band attempting to leave its midwestern twenty-something perspective behind. More Adventurous, in other words, was the product of Rilo Kiley aging gracefully.

Someone else attempted to age gracefully not that long ago. Her name was Liz Phair. I thought I was pretty clever making this comparison, but then I read the Stylus review and they said the comparison was obvious, so I’m going to switch gears and suggest that the real analogy isn’t between Under the Blacklight and the awful Lavigne-lite Liz Phair, but rather between More Adventurous and whitechocolatespaceegg, Liz Phair’s often-overlooked third album. There are plenty of similarities. whitechocolatespaceegg was a joint venture between indie label Matador and major label Capitol, designed to put some distance between Phair and her Exile days by polishing the sound and throwing in a number of tracks written from a more mature perspective. The result was a more adult album with a bit more conventional pop sense. In other words, More Adventurous.

Under the Blacklight is nowhere near as embarrassing as Liz Phair, but they also share some similarities—mainly that both albums seemed to be the product of artists looking for a big play but uncertain of their direction now that the first phase of their career had ended. With Phair it translated into a giant “fuck you” to years of heightened expectations. With Rilo Kiley it seems instead to translate into a big genre quick-change act. No longer willing to return to the days of Execution, no longer satisfied with the apparently slow evolution as depicted on More Adventurous, and no longer able to ignore the increasing attention from the mainstream, Rilo Kiley had to go big or go home. Thus the teflon production and the streamlined lyrical content.

Though Liz Phair’s metamorphosis into a teen punk-pop goddess wannabe scared the living daylights out of most of us, such titanic shifts in sensibility are still quite rare. Rilo Kiley is in no danger of turning into the Pussycat Dolls, and even behind the gloss and the genrehopping you can sense the Rilo Kiley of old. But Under the Blacklight does the band few favours. The disco glam of “Breakin’ Up” is way too cheesy, “15″ sounds less like countrified strut and more like the Hollywood-approved version thereof, and “Dejalo” is about as worldly as Santana featuring Matchbox 20’s Rob Thomas. All of this is the sound of Rilo Kiley going camp, with predictably embarrassing results.

Moreover, the meditations on sex and its associated industries, especially in the full-length video to first single “The Moneymaker,” suffer the same problem as the songs: it all just feels a bit too cliché. Even at its most melodramatic (hello “Does He Love You?”), the lyrical content of Most Adventurous never seemed to rely on overused tropes. “A Man, Me, Then Jim” was full of little illuminating details that highlight the benefits of Rilo Kiley’s previous tendency towards verbosity. In contrast, listening to Under the Blacklight’s “15″ is both an aural and lyrical assault.

It’s only when Lewis and company avoid the temptation to toss in easy genre clichés that the album comes closest to success. “Silver Lining” and “Close Call” lean a bit on Lewis’s alt-country material and Rilo Kiley’s More Adventurous sound respectively, which is at least comfortable territory. “Dreamworld” is the highlight of the album, though, in that it’s a departure from the usual Rilo Kiley sound but remembers how to be a good song. It might also explain why Fleetwood Mac comparisons are flying fast and furious these days. Finally, it hopefully proves to the naysayers that the Blake Sennett song isn’t automatically the worst song on a Rilo Kiley album (though if you’ve seen Sennett and Lewis perform Execution’s “So Long” in concert, you already know this).

So where does Rilo Kiley go from here? If we stretch the Liz Phair analogy well beyond the breaking point, the next album will be a tepid retread of More Adventurous (Less Adventurous?). Or maybe Rilo Kiley will drop the camp and settle into the role of a neo-Fleetwood Mac, effectively putting themselves beyond critical reproach in the way all broadly popular bands are. One thing’s for sure, though: whether Rilo Kiley sink or swim probably won’t be decided with this album. For this they should probably be thankful.