[review 2007: favourites]

I saw Marnie Stern during the summer during her full-band tour; previously she’d crisscrossed the States with nothing but a guitar and an iPod in tow, and even played a show at SXSW with the pseudo-karaoke setup. And though the show loses a certain something without Zach Hill behind a real drumkit—not just his furious octopus-arms drumming, but also the spectacle of watching him pour sweat out of his shoes two songs into the set—Stern’s ability to impress was apparently intact. And why not? Marnie Stern is easily the most impressive guitarist I saw this year, and it’s exhausting just to watch her long, unbroken strings of hammer-ons.

In Advance of the Broken Arm is a proof of concept for Stern and her virtuoso math-rock-meets-speed-metal stylings. The 44-minute album was built on a foundation of home demos she recorded before anyone had ever heard of her, after a late blooming where she discovered the likes of Don Caballero and Sleater-Kinney. From there, she sent her tapes in to Kill Rock Stars unsolicited, and found herself the proud owner of a record deal. It’s not hard to see why: Stern’s debut is jam-packed with energy, with every song cramming in the products of three whirling dervishes. Stern’s vocals sound like a seven-year-old girl channelling Corin Tucker, her guitar playing more closely resembles someone playing a thrash keyboard turned up to 12, and Zach Hill’s drumming is more hyperactive and explosive than three normal drummers packed into one body with all their limbs left intact. Any one ingredient would catch your ear; all three at once is like a never-ending tsunami of gloriously raucous noise.

The one issue is that because Stern and Hill only have one speed, the songs tend to blur into each other, and by the end of the album you might experience a certain amount of listener fatigue—especially since at times it feels like you’re listening to the album being played at four times its normal speed. But the one thing that makes it all better is the last track, “Patterns of a Diamond Ceiling,” where Stern builds a psychoacoustic space out of guitar overdubs before bringing it all crashing down in a devastatingly loud outro. The whole concept, complete with arch narration from Stern herself, is deliciously over the top and definitely not to everyone’s taste. You can think of the final track as a litmus test for the album itself—if you made it all the way to the end and you can buy fully into “Patterns of a Diamond Ceiling,” then Marnie Stern owns you completely. It might not be my absolute favourite, and it does get a little repetitive, but In Advance of the Broken Arm was one of the most exciting things I heard all year.

[review 2007: honourable mentions]

If you bought The Shapes We Make, you probably already know that you’re part of a small but devoted group of Mary Timony fans. You probably remember Helium, remember The Dirt of Luck, remember the too-long-by-half fallow period between Helium’s breakup and Timony’s first solo album. You made it through Timony’s ren-faire period, and maybe even liked it very much. And then, two years ago, you heard a Mary Timony album that made you stand up and take notice: Ex Hex is Timony’s best solo outing to date, tossing a lot of the medieval-music trappings and charging ahead with the hardest guitar riffs of her career and the amps turned up to eleven. Of course, once you’ve made the breakthrough album (in a career littered with left turns and breakthroughs), what do you do for an encore?

In Timony’s case, you form another band. She’s always had other people play on her albums, but for The Shapes We Make the Boston-by-way-of-D.C. indie rocker felt the contributions of her backing band were important enough to warrant giving them full credit for the album’s sound. The Shapes We Make does sound more like the product of a full band than Ex Hex, but that could be just as much an intentional shift away from Mary Timony as rock star; the new album is the more mild-mannered sibling to Ex Hex’s guitar hero acrobatics and attitude. It’s not as euphoric an album, and there’s a greater tendency towards vaguely proggy guitar jams. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as Timony’s quite good at finding a balance between too straightforward and too wankish (”Curious Minds” is a really good example), but it does mean Timony’s new album occupies a slightly different, less immediate headspace.

The most direct songs tend to be the most successful initially, with “Sharpshooter” and “Summer’s Fawn” galloping along at a decent clip. “Pause/Off” contains some very obvious political jabs at a time when most artists are content to make veiled references to the war and the Bush administration. It’s hard to mistake the intent of “Get your laws off my body, mister / pause/off, Supreme Court misters / don’t mess around with me and my sisters.” This is especially notable considering Timony’s own tendencies in the past to use old-tyme settings and characters in favour of more contemporary references; it’s a lot easier to use “Pause/Off” as a rallying cry than, say, “Musik and Charming Melodee.”

Occasionally the album dips into overly ponderous territory; “Window” and “Pink Clouds” are pleasant but not particularly interesting, and they occur late in the album, which is just when Ex Hex was finding a second wind. But the real issue doesn’t necessarily lie with the album as a piece of music, but rather as a historical artifact. Over a decade into her career, Timony’s still working her own particular groove. Many interviews have focused on her unwillingness to adapt to the changing winds of “indie rock,” and it’s quite true—by virtue of catering to her own whims, which actually haven’t changed too drastically over the years even with the medieval obsessions, Timony has unintentionally cast herself as a maverick in opposition to the increasingly corporate indie rock scene. But her stalwart independence has its price: The Shapes We Make, though it doesn’t sound particularly dated or old, is unlikely to win many new converts because this album shares much the same spirit with albums she made in the late 90s, and a lot of people have moved on.

So, if you’re a fan of The Shapes We Make—and I definitely am—what does this all mean, exactly? Is Timony a cult figure whose appeal lies partially in our nostalgia for when “indie rock” wasn’t such a meaningless term? Does she have anything genuinely new to bring to the table, or is she just extremely good at refining the same basic sound from her Helium days? Why am I even asking these questions of Timony when I might not necessarily ask them of, say, Yo La Tengo or Sonic Youth or any of a hundred other bands that have survived from the last decade? And finally, just because I’m self-indulgent at the best of times: does liking this album mean I’m getting old?

[review 2007: honourable mentions]

Sometimes you’ll read the reviews for an album and wonder if maybe you should’ve gotten that PhD in media studies or comparative literature, because the level of discourse seems to be several fathoms over your head. Friend Opportunity is one of those albums where every review makes you feel like a dolt. Forward-thinking? “They’re ‘deconstructing pop,’ which means they’re asking questions,” says Pitchfork of the album’s final track. “Part of what’s been endearing about this less caustic phase of the band is the loosely conceptual feel of their records,” says Tiny Mix Tapes. And then there’s the late, lamented Stylus with a reviewer who’s obviously thought very, very hard about what Deerhoof is: “There’s a self-involvement to their songs, a refusal to communicate beyond itself, that drives detractors to call the band ‘nihilistic.’”

Clearly Deerhoof are up to something far more interesting than just putting together fractured and frenetic pop albums, but if you’ve come to me to make heads or tails of Deerhoof’s grand vision you’re asking the wrong person. I barely pay attention to the lyrics; I can’t tell you if there’s a grand narrative weaving through the album, or if “The Perfect Me” is “trying really hard to be a pop song,” as the Stylus review indicates. I can’t place Deerhoof into the constellation of indie prog or avant-garde pop bands, or really any context at all. All I have is this album and this infernal brain of mine, ill-suited to drawing such complex connections.

If you’re looking for the Fisher-Price “shiny glowy things are shiny” review, though, welcome! Have a seat and let me tell you about Friend Opportunity, which on the scale of “not shiny” to “very shiny,” is a definite “wow that’s really shiny.” When I bought the album, I was basically hoping for an album full of the elements that made first track “The Perfect Me” such a killer song: namely the sound of 10,000 galloping out-of-control racehorses led by an evil organist mastermind with a giant purple cape and a twirly moustache. Packed with vitamins and explosions, “The Perfect Me” is one of the best pop songs of the year almost by sheer force of will—it packs more exciting twists, turns and switchbacks into three minutes than entire albums did this year.

Deerhoof can’t sustain the energy across the entire album, but the same otherworldly atmosphere and fragmented songwriting remains over the next eight tracks. “+81″ and “Believe E.S.P.” are the most conventional songs on the album, though there’s plenty of amusing meanders and tangents to follow even so. It’s also on the first couple of tracks that helium angel slash vocalist Satomi Matsuzaki’s unique singing style bears the most fruit, serving as counterpoint to the muscular and frenetic instrumental work—especially the insistent drum work of Greg Saunier. Whether Matsuzaki has the presence to carry “Whiter the Invisible Birds?”, though, I’m still not entirely sure.

Friend Opportunity is largely an appealing set of sounds and hooks that occasionally cohere into great songs. And even when those hooks don’t come together as maybe they should (like “Kids Are So Small,” a song held together mainly by the insistent repetition of the oh-so-quotable “if I were a man and you were dog, I’d throw stick for you”) the sounds are so happy shiny awesome that you shorten your attention span to compensate, so that every measure is like opening another box of Cracker Jacks and finding a brand new toy. Unfortunately it all falls apart on the last track, “Look Away,” which by all accounts is a sort of throwback to the more experimental side of Deerhoof that I’m not familiar with myself. This would be okay except that the song takes up a full third of the album’s 36-minute running time. As a result, Friend Opportunity leaves less of a lasting impression by virtue of losing a big chunk to distracted, directionless noodling. Pretend the album is a 24-minute EP instead, though, and you’ve got the aural equivalent of a kid’s ballpit: full of bright colours and fun noises.

[review 2007: honourable mentions]

For the Weakerthans it’s been a relatively straightforward progression since Left and Leaving. Reconstruction Site was the band’s first album for Epitaph, and probably the album with the widest appeal to date. The punkish guitar pop sound found itself with a little less punk and a little more pop, and the shift to character studies as lyrical subject material meant more people could relate in some way to the songs.

But for those of us who felt in their bones the desire to play on the baggage carousel or tape notes to the heavy machines like “we hope they treat you well, hope you don’t work too hard” (which, by the way, I always hoped were messages not to the operators of the machines, but to the machines themselves), Reconstruction Site was a bit of a letdown. Sure, the story of Michel Foucault and an Antarctica explorer having dinner was really funny and endearing (though the ill-advised country detour on “A New Name For Everything” balances that out), but it didn’t make up for the sense that John K. Samson was no longer really talking just to you, or about how you felt inside. Maybe this is why the Weakerthans were so popular with college crowds: they had just the right balance of literary compulsion and emotional sensitivity.

Where does Reunion Tour leave us, then? Seven years after Left and Leaving and ten after Fallow, it’d be foolish to imagine Samson would go back to writing about teenage flights of fancy or college-age heartbreak. Instead, the band adds to its catalogue of odes to Canadiana like hockey (”Elegy for Gump Worsley”), Winnipeg transit (”Civil Twilight”) and curling (”Tournament of Hearts,” a title that American commentators almost universally missed was a reference to the Canadian women’s curling championships). In that sense the Weakerthans are becoming ever so slightly like the Tragically Hip. But then the Tragically Hip never wrote a song about curling, as far as I remember. For that the Weakerthans have my everlasting gratitude (and apparently Canadian curling’s everlasting gratitude as well, if you read interviews with the band).

But gratitude doesn’t necessarily translate into love. Thankfully, Reunion Tour is an easier album to love than Reconstruction Site was. Though the Weakerthans’ sound is even tamer this time around, now just a glossier form of punk-inflected indie rock that won’t offend anyone by being too loud or too unpredictable, the band still knows the fine art of good songwriting, and there’s never a track that’s anything less than pleasant. At its best, like on “Civil Twilight” and “Tournament of Hearts,” Reunion Tour is still full of good singalongs and earworms.

If there’s a problem with the album, it’s that it’s not and never can be Left and Leaving. There’s no “My Favourite Chords,” no “Watermark,” no “Everything Must Go!” And perhaps the Weakerthans are a bit too complacent for comfort’s sake; one wonders how much longer they can stretch out their current modus operandi without making major changes to the formula. But for now, Reunion Tour will keep the Weakerthans in my good graces and even improve their standing a notch or two.

[review 2007: honourable mentions]

It all comes down to this: as much as I want to like In Our Bedroom After the War, it’s just not the album I was hoping it would be. That doesn’t make it bad at all, and actually there are a lot of good songs on the album. But if you’re hoping for a record that outdoes Set Yourself on Fire, keep looking.

Maybe that’s unfair to Stars, who’ve recorded an album that, like all their previous albums, takes a subtly different approach. Set Yourself on Fire was the Montreal band’s boldest and brightest statement to date. The one-two punch of “Your Ex-Lover is Dead” and the title track sounded grander and more luscious than everything off Heart, itself a more luxurious album than the almost-forgotten Nightsongs, and that trend continued throughout the album. By contrast, In Our Bedroom After the War reins things in a bit, choosing a more intimate and scaled-back approach.

I always imagined Stars as the musical equivalent of brash, foolhardy romantic proclamations, and I’ll point to “Soft Revolution” and the opening of “What the Snowman Learned About Love” (”Hi, I’m Amy, and this is my heart.”) as ample evidence that at one point in their career, they might’ve agreed. Even the way Torq sang and acted in concert had that stoic, damn-the-torpedoes attitude, like the band was going to war to fight for your freedom to love. Like so many movies set after wars, In Our Bedroom After the War is introspective, and though there’s no reason to suggest Stars can’t pull this off, it’s also not exactly their strong suit.

So we get intensely personal ballads like “Barricades,” where Torq reveals a hitherto unheard crooner side, and fit-for-AM-radio pop songs like “My Favourite Book” and “The Ghost of Genova Heights.” All these songs are excellent in their own right, once you remember that this album is not Set Yourself on Fire and was never intended to be. Where the new album begins to fall apart is in the last couple of tracks; “Life 2: The Unhappy Ending” only has the chorus to recommend it, and “Today Will Be Better, I Swear!” has even less. The album closes with the title track, which is almost entirely forgettable.

The real problem is that besides “Personal” and “Barricade,” it doesn’t feel like Stars has taken a whole lot of risks here. “My Favourite Book” is still one of my favourite tracks off the album, but I have to admit it’s not exactly groundbreaking material for the band. And the reason why “Personal” and “Barricade” feel like risks is because they run in the opposite direction from everything on Stars’ last album. They’re utterly naked songs, with no studio wizardry, lavish instrumentation or even much in the way of quirky lyricism to hide the emotional payload. By comparison the rest of the album feels a bit too easy, a bit too much like they’ve been there and done it before.

And that’s why I keep bringing up Set Yourself on Fire: In Our Bedroom After the War just hasn’t move far enough away from that blueprint to leave the inevitable comparisons behind, and so it will always live in the shadow of its bigger brother. (Or sister. I don’t know how you classify the gender of an album.) Forget Set Yourself on Fire exists and you have a very good Stars album, with a number of pleasant-sounding tunes like “Window Bird” and the aforementioned “My Favourite Book.” Concentrate on the differences between the two albums and you’ll still find plenty to like—besides “Personal” and “Barricade” there’s the odd falsetto-laced “The Ghost of Genova Heights.” And even when the album does take up motifs from its predecessor, like “Bitches in Tokyo” does “Ageless Beauty,” it occasionally hits its mark. So there’s plenty to like about In Our Bedroom After the War in the end. But…

[review 2007: odds and ends]

Sometimes you can write entire screeds about an album. And sometimes you can barely write a sentence. For whatever reason, here’s some of the albums this year that had me fresh out of new perspectives.

Joel Plaskett Emergency – Ashtray Rock. Plaskett applies his many talents to a concept that’s obviously close to his heart (though apparently fictional): two East Coast teenagers in a band, ripped apart by their competing affections for a girl. Unfortunately, meeting the needs of the narrative requires Plaskett to up the filler quotient, but “Fashionable People” and the accompanying video are damned near irresistible, “Face of the Earth” and “Nothing More to Say” are deliciously melodramatic, and “The Instrumental” is surprisingly satisfying for an interstitial. If the album had a couple more of Plaskett’s trademark rockers it’d be an even better album.

[review 2007: odds and ends]

Sometimes you can write entire screeds about an album. And sometimes you can barely write a sentence. For whatever reason, here’s some of the albums this year that had me fresh out of new perspectives.

C.O.C.O. – Play Drums + Bass. Olivia Ness and Chris Sutton record another set of minimalist indie funk standards that have you marvel at how much Ness has grown as a singer—and how little the band’s ambitions have grown in the same period. But maybe there’s just not that much you can do with a bass guitar and drums, and C.O.C.O. are already pushing the envelope as far as it will go. Or maybe they’re not evolving much because the new album is still groovetastic, even if it’s not that dissimilar from their last CD.

[review 2007: crimes and misdemeanours]

Easy analogy time: if Funeral was the one-room churchhouse in the middle of the Québécois hinterland during the dead of winter, then Neon Bible is the towering cathedral with giant stained-glass windows, the only material deemed suitable enough to allow the light of God to shine in. It’s an easy analogy not just because of the Arcade Fire’s resemblance to a religious experience distilled into band form, but also because the fucking pipe organ is right there on “Intervention” for all to hear.

Strangely, Neon Bible doesn’t seem to invoke the same sort of feverish devotion Funeral did. I may never have been a true convert myself, but I could understand why you’d lay down your life for songs like “Rebellion (Lies)” and “Wake Up.” Of all the tracks on the new album, the only one that could inspire that same adoration is “No Cars Go,” which is actually one of the band’s earliest songs, re-recorded for Neon Bible. And re-recorded in sufficiently grand fashion, too: for the first time the Arcade Fire has a song that sounds as though it could move heaven and earth on its surges of emotion.

But you can understand why the entire album isn’t just twelve carbon copies of “No Cars Go.” For one, the Arcade Fire can’t simply re-record all their old songs. Putting the entire album into emotional overdrive would be exhausting as well—you can only muster up so much enthusiasm and devotion so many times before you’ve literally got nothing left to give. Pacing, people, pacing. And in fact some of the album’s best songs are the low-key ones, like the title track and “Ocean of Noise.”

Unfortunately there are times when the luminescent quality of all good Arcade Fire songs disappears, and everything falls flat. “Intervention” is the most obvious example, its pipe organ a hugely unwelcome intrusion that turns the first half of the song into an overwrought, flatfooted mess from which the band never fully recovers. Album closer “My Body is a Cage” is a valiant attempt, too, but that doesn’t mean I ever want to listen to it again.

To close with a slightly less obvious analogy, if Funeral was the cult, Neon Bible is the theology—a time for building on the initial religious upswelling with mythology and commandments and all sorts of other celestial housekeeping. Neon Bible is an epic album, more complex and far more ambitious than Funeral ever was. And there is a certain joy in the cathedrals Arcade Fire now seem intent on building. But unless you were already utterly convinced by Funeral you may find Neon Bible a bit of a cipher, and anyone who didn’t like the first album will just feel more like the outsider looking in.

[review 2007: crimes and misdemeanours]

If there’s one thing that was slightly frustrating about this year from a writer’s perspective, it’s that even the bad albums weren’t all that bad. It’s hard to rip apart an album that you dislike mostly because it’s not good enough to love. And so even though I’m writing about Kristin Hersh’s sixth album right after Rilo Kiley’s unfortunate mess of genre experiments gone awry, Learn to Sing Like a Star is really quite a bit better than Under the Blacklight. Maybe some explanation is in order.

A lot of my favourite artists put out new albums this year, and if you’re like me your relationship to each artist is at a different stage in the life cycle. Maybe you’re still in the honeymoon phase for some; for others, it’s more like a steady marriage; and then there are some where you’re about seven seconds from admitting you’re no longer in love. So it’s entirely predictable that some of those albums by some of those favourite artists of mine will end up falling flat, even if they’re perfectly serviceable records. Maybe you’ve moved on, or maybe they’ve moved on, or maybe it’s a combination of both; whatever the case, the two of you are no longer right for each other.

And so, while Kristin Hersh has made a perfectly serviceable album, with a couple of very fine songs in the mix, it’s apparent to me that I will never enjoy Learn to Sing Like a Star the same way I did Strange Angels or Sky Motel, or even Sunny Border Blue. And though Learn to Sing Like a Star is an admirable return to form after The Grotto, it’s just not enough for me any more.

This is especially odd for me to say, considering that the last Throwing Muses album and 50 Foot Wave’s first album, Golden Ocean, are some of my favourite Kristin Hersh releases. In fact, if either band decides to put out another album—though I don’t expect one from Throwing Muses ever again—I’ll be right there to let Hersh and company rock my face off. Maybe the reason why those harder-rocking albums sit better with me than Hersh’s recent solo output is because no matter how the albums change, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s all been done before. With Learn to Sing Like a Star Hersh mostly ditches the electric guitar but keeps the more vigorous songwriting. The result is a sort of acoustic-guitar rock album, with a string section and a piano backing most of the tracks. Actually, it might even be more accurate to have it the other way around: a cello-and-violin rock album, with an acoustic guitar and a piano backing most of the tracks. It’s the string section that gives the album its particular character versus the rest of Hersh’s catalogue, at least.

That instrumental difference aside, however, I’m hard-pressed to say what differentiates this particular set of songs from the other Hersh albums. And perhaps, in lieu of any other good reasons, that’s the problem with Learn to Sing Like a Star. Sky Motel I remember vividly, even if it’s only got about as many good tracks as this album does. Maybe Learn to Sing Like a Star just needs some time to soak into my consciousness, to take its rightful place besides the other albums. But right now, the album just feels a bit too cluttered and a bit too bland to leave much of an impression.

[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.