Rilo Kiley

by Brad Nelson on 05 Sep 2007

Do you ever wake up in the morning and think, Man, I fucking hate Gilmour/Waters-era Pink Floyd?

Because I do every single morning. Afterwards, I eat breakfast and contemplate burning my unplayed-for-at-least-eight-years copy of "Dark Side of the Moon."

Between each Cheerio I reminisce of the days when I was twelve and that record threw a brick at the proverbial window of my perceptions of what music could be. After that, I went through a long phase where if all the tracks on an album did not somehow bleed into one another it was not a true artistic statement.

Regardless, I have now seen the light, and my dear friends, in case you haven't been clued in, that light is Syd Barrett. Pink Floyd never again produced an album as complete or good as "Piper at the Gates of Dawn," (1967) For that matter, probably no one's released anything as good as his first solo album "The Madcap Laughs," (1970)Though, after listening to Rilo Kiley's album "The Execution of all things" (2002), my love for the sweet and all-too-brief Barrett era and utter contempt for Gilmour and Waters era is not the slightest bit original. It's like those affected indie kids who claim to hate Led Zeppelin; a basic physical impossibility.

Once Gilmour took the reigns with Pink Floyd, he guided the band by firmly rooting the songwriting in his background of blues and jazz while keeping remnants of Barrett's psychedelia, which is a nice way of saying he took the tunes out and made the songs twice as long.Two shitty soundtracks and an "Atom Heart Mother" later, they were a completely different band. This is to say nothing of what the band would morph into once Waters got right pissed enough to work with Bob Ezrin and make movies with animated, walking hammers.

Something clearly went awry down the line.Rilo Kiley, is a band who has nothing to do with progressive or psychedelic rock, in fact just happens to be two grown-up kid actors and two other dudes doin' the "indie" thing. The band has recently ascended from their indie-dom to write an album full of country belle-isms and one song that really sounds like Fleetwood Mac - that will probably achieve minor success on VH1 and perhaps lead to soccer moms blasting "The Moneymaker" on their way to and from the field. Man, ain't nothing like a song about selling your body to take you back to the good old days.

Now, the new album, "Under the Blacklight", isn't bad - in fact, it's rather good. It's just decidedly, less good than Rilo Kiley's previous records. Kinda like Pink Floyd, except without the understandable lineup renovations. You probably see where I'm going with this whole article.Before, when Rilo Kiley was "indie" they released a great album. When I say great I don't mean, "well, it's got a few flaws, but it's nice enough."

No, I mean "this could be the soundtrack to someone's life" great; "this is the record I put on when I feel like going fetal and rocking back and forth" great; "this is all I really need from music" great. is overstating the matter somewhat, but regardless, I remain unrelenting in my complete support for Rilo Kiley's "The Execution of All Things."Let's take a look at the basics: before Jenny Lewis aspired to be the next Dusty Springfield, she was writing extended narratives for her band about her parents' divorce and generally feeling like shit. She was writing about how "sometimes in the morning I am petrified and can't move."Music journalism tends to become pandering when a writer attempts to implore the reader to identify with the lyrics of their subject.

Yet, if the refrain of "I feel nothing" in "Paint's Peeling" doesn't absolutely take you back to those points in your life where you indeed felt nothing, I don't know what will. Maybe that's just me, I don't know.What I'm certain of is that Jenny Lewis and her fellow songwriter Blake Sennett hit at the heart of something on this record. I'm not sure what, and I'm not sure they know what either. But what it does emotionally, from "And That's How I Choose to Remember It," a Casio-toned meditation on her parents divorcing that's split up and spread throughout the album.

While giving thematic coherence to the work as a whole, to the almost final line of the album, "[what] if we're too late for happiness?" is easily comparable to the best rock records out there. Records that instead of merely holding a mirror up to humanity, force you through it and leave you to examine the mess.Beyond that, there's not much to say.

They mostly serve to reinforce the message, to which, as seen on the record's first climax and side-closer, "A Better Son/Daughter," a marching beat accompanies a distressful state of affairs, where "the lows are so extreme that the good seems fucking cheap." There is yet the hope, the promise that something better may come, where:

You'll be honest, you'll be brave,
you'll be handsome and you'll be beautiful.
You'll be happy.

And it probably won't happen, but it could. And isn't that why we're here after all, to strive for something we may never be, but as long as we can obtain tiny fragments of it, we can say we lived a fulfilling life?In the case of both "Piper" and "Execution," we may be better human beings for it.

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