July 11th, 2005
Rilo Kiley - Take Offs and Landings
Rilo Kiley
Take Offs and Landings ***
Before you start thinking you’ve lost all concept of time and another Rilo Kiley album has come around all too quickly, relax. It was only January since the release of More Adventurous and Take Off and Landings, isn’t a new, hastily-recorded collection, it’s a reissue of their 2001 debut. Hailing from Los Angeles, this is the sunny-soaked indie pop with a country tilt. It strikes that rare balance of sounding resolutely jaunty while feeling a bit sad, almost like the musical equivalent of being at a party, surrounded by friends, having a great time but then seeing the stranger you’ve fancied all night, kissing someone else.
Singer Jenny Lewis sounds like Aimee Mann’s younger sister, and her lyrics are sincere meditations on love, as on ‘Waves and Wires’ and ‘Rest of My Life’. Then, out of nowhere, they become really funny, or even surreal. In ‘We’ll Never Sleep (God knows We’ll Try), she intones: “We circle your uncle’s parking lot/Just to see how many times that we can before we get caught/You guessed on twentyâ€? as if it’s the most everyday thing in the world. Sometimes the combined melody and obscure reference delivered in that earnest American drawl hauls up a They Might Be Giants flashback. But only for a moment, before another lovelorn confession, more representative of their earnest, country-pop ballads replaces it. Nice hidden track (one of three on the album sung by Elected member Blake Sennett) too. A quirky slice of country-pop surrealism.