It's the prerogative and privilege of any pop act to change direction. It's one of the things that makes pop music so exciting. But change always carries a degree of risk, and in the case of Rilo Kiley's fourth album Under the Blacklight, it manifests a wonderful sense of irony: Under the Blacklight is Rilo Kiley's riskiest album because it's their album that takes the least risks.
Finding the band's music polished to an almost blinding sheen, Blacklight is not a commercial album so much as Rilo Kiley's conception (or misconception) of what a commercial album is. It's their "Project Mersh", an alternate-universe sell-out move. But beneath that surface-- and Under the Blacklight is at first listen almost overwhelmingly surface-- Rilo Kiley must know they're full of shit. Either they're utterly serious about their flirtation with the mainstream or they're taking the piss with a wink. In both cases, the songs suffer a smothering slow death by context.
At the same time, the fun-- or maybe "fun"-- disc stresses how humorless and full of shit Rilo Kiley's former indie brethren remain, scared stiff of the prospect of unabashed pop in the true please-the-masses sense. But it's still an audacious, fascinating exploration of banality, almost to a patronizing point. Perhaps it's no coincidence that the big, straight down the middle-sounding first single is called "The Moneymaker".
From note one, the album's musical allusions and the references come fast and furious, and are often strikingly specific. The mock swagger of "Moneymaker", for instance, sounds like Heart doing Foreigner's "Juke Box Hero", and the rest of the disc revels in similar oddball but specific collisions. The title track sounds like Aimee Mann writing a song for Mandy Moore. "Dejalo" is Rilo Kiley's take on Miami Sound Machine. "Dreamworld" is *Mirage-*era Fleetwood Mac. "Smoke Detector" is Blondie by way of the Beatles. "15" does blue-eyed soul like Dusty Springfield. And so on.
The saving grace for something so shallow is, as usual, Jenny Lewis, a strikingly direct singer and an even better lyricist. Especially following the verbose More Adventurous, she's almost ruthlessly efficient with her words here, making the most of a few choice lines. "Smoke Detector" demonstrates nearly as many derivations and variations in meaning of the word "smoke" as there are of the word "fuck," including "to fuck." "I took a man back to my room," she coos. "I was smoking him in bed/ Yeah, I was smoking in bed."
In "Close Call" Lewis wryly observes "funny thing about money for sex/ You might get rich but you'll die by it," while the title track features the withering pun of an aphorism "even dead men lie in their coffins." "15" tracks the seduction of a wounded and vulnerable young woman, ripe like a peach and "down for almost anything."
Many of Lewis's other character-study lyrics plum the sexual, too, not like a cop-out coy pop princess (even though someone like, say, Hilary Duff could do a fine job with the obvious cell phone metaphor of "Breakin' Up") but in a grown up sort of way. Or at least a distorted, corrupted, grown-up-in-L.A. sort of way.
Ah, L.A., where there's a thrift shop on every corner, the breakfast spots bustle well into the night, the lines at clubland bathroom stalls snake to early 1980s lengths, acts get signed at karaoke bars, and the plastic surgeons know just the thing to do with all those rough edges. Forget that Rilo Kiley's songs namedrop Brighton, New York, and Laredo: Under the Blacklight adds up to the familiar headline "California Band Makes California Album." Were all the AOR indulgences at least tied together into a concept they might have been more easily forgiven. And were any of those lyrics a little more pointed and less generalized, like they were in the anomalously galvanizing anti-Bush protest "It's a Hit", they'd add up to more than just a 40-minute short story collection on tape (with incidental music).
For the relative few who really, really care, debates may rage over whether Under the Blacklight marks some sort of progress, though what's just as likely is that Rilo Kiley's earlier output was artificially regressive in a bid for some sort of cred. But leave that stuff to the conspiracy theorists. To be fair, most everyone would be well served giving in and enjoying Rilo Kiley's pop for pop's sake, smart, dumb and especially smug in equal measure. Song by song it goes down awfully easy, but be warned. The band sure cleans up well, but there's a fair amount of guilty washing and hand-scrubbing to be done afterwards.
