Oh Jenny and Blake, why have you forsaken me?
We’ve had some good times, haven’t we? I can still remember the first time I heard a Rilo Kiley record, how beautiful I thought “So Long” was, how my heart stuck in my throat when I heard you sing “It’s so fucking beautiful,” and how I felt like you had peered directly into my soul with “A Better Son/Daughter.”
Of course I knew that it couldn’t last forever. After all, time goes on, we grow up and drift apart. I just never thought it would be like this.
I was anticipating an amicable fadeout – an old friend who you see every once in a while and reminisce about old times. Instead, it’s like an ex-girlfriend who got really into goth or meth or Scientology or something after you broke up. In fact, you have a hard time even remembering how you could have loved this person in the first place. Was this always buried in there somewhere and I just didn’t notice? And then, for just a few seconds, the old person shines through and it all comes crashing back, but then she starts talking about the ARC triangle and “livingness” and you make your excuses and back away quietly.
I’ll admit, my high hopes were a little tempered by Jenny Lewis’ pleasant but bland Rabbit Fur Coat. The reaction was so positive from critics and fans that it seemed inevitable they would continue in that direction. Why keep making effervescent and clever music when you can bring in the fans by dulling the edges and making a mainstream pop record?
And the result of such calculations: Under the Blacklight, a record with a few nice melodies buried underneath several tons of photoshoots and soulless production. The record’s “theme” of seedy lives being exposed was very cutting edge in 1983, I’m sure, but which is so cliched by this point that it has about as much emotional resonance as an episode of Miami Vice.
It can be divided into the following categories
– Songs that are soul-crushingly boring (Close Call, Dreamworld, Smoke Detector, Give a Little Love)
– Songs that are obnoxiously self-satisfied (Dejalo)
– Songs that think they’re dark and sexy but actually are just embarrassing (The Moneymaker, Dejalo again)
– Songs that think they’re an interesting juxtaposition of genres, but turn out to be stale retreads of a million mediocre 80s bands (Breakin’ Up, Dejalo AGAIN)
– Songs that seem to operate on the premise that if you add horns to an irrelevant track it turns into gold (15)
– Songs that try to rise out of the muck around them but are just a little too precious and insignificant to make it (Silver Lining, Under the Blacklight)
– The one moment where they show us something new and wonderful – what the whole record would have sounded like if I had my way (The Angels Hung Around)
Some will say this is just progress, that they’re trying to be more serious, to rise above their past and make a record that means something. And they’ll point to a bunch of love songs in their earlier works and some sophomoric lyrics on tracks like “It’s a Hit.” But those people would be wrong. Simple subject matter does not make a record insignificant. And the untutored lyrics were part of the charm. You didn’t demand perfection because you cared far more about how it felt than how it looked in a glossy magazine.
Because the long and short is that those old records were fun. They felt like real life, with some bumps and rough edges but natural and carefree for all that. In contrast, Under the Blacklight feels like a beer commercial – and not even a particularly good one. It’s a gritty TV show pummeled into meaninglessness by a hundred executive meetings.
I disagree with a lot of Pitchfork reviews, but their take on this one was pretty spot-on: “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.”
That’s exactly right, and it’s a shame because they are clearly one of the most talented and inventive bands around. But they took the easy way out on this one, and they need to be called out for it.
MP3s:
The Angels Come Around (which is really quite lovely)
A Better Son/Daughter (from 2002’s fantastic The Execution of All Things)