Record (Re)Collection: Lion Cub’s Chad Jewett On Rilo Kiley’s “More Adventurous”

The thorn of Rilo Kiley was always the bittersweet tinge of loss. Popular music is at its best an admixture of nostalgia, expectation and familiarity. How much better, then, when that mixture is projected as fleeting, always almost gone. The band’s finest songs were those that promised abandon and threatened abandonment. More Adventurous begins only because it needs to. If it could it would end 11 times, but even the first handful of seconds crest with far away echoes, with the reverberations of something happening before the first page. The language of “It’s A Hit,” “Does He Love You?” and “Portions for Foxes” is in the present tense, but is obsessed with the achingly intangible and unreachable, and again, there are all those echoes.

Rilo Kiley always flirted with endings, and the beauty of More Adventurous is the passion of loss. Jenny Lewis sings, “and then there is no mystery left,” which of course is a penultimate disappointment to the album’s final statement: “Everybody dies.” That she sings so devastatingly about the end of mystery and so warmly about the universality of “endings” says everything about the small and mostly terrific body of work that Rilo Kiley built. These are writers interested only in third acts.

If Blake Sennett had the control that Jenny Lewis did, Rilo Kiley would be a flawed embodiment of the concepts they constantly expressed. “Ripchord” is perhaps the finest moment of a perfect album because of it’s imperfection. The song, captured organically (whether that naturalism is in fact synthetic or not) resembles the fatigue that Jenny Lewis is perhaps incapable of enacting, regardless of how good she is at expressing (though she comes close in “Absence of God”). Blake Sennett’s voice is not weak so much as it’s intuitive; note when and where control is lost and you’ll see Rilo Kiley finally stepping into the part it’s written. It is when he is not in fact expressing, but simply giving voice.

“I never loved somebody the way that I loved you” – “Maybe love won’t let you down” – “And it’s only doubts that we’re counting on fingers broken long ago” – “Love and war in heaven and in hell, you get what you deserve, you better spend it well.”: Tenses change, doubts about the future swell with remainders and reminders. Each blossom of horns or slide guitar sounds untethered in a perpetual present/past tense that grows with each new ending rehearsed. The album closes with bravery: “Because everybody dies.”  But it blooms to its peak, to its apotheosis with a final, heartbreaking truth: “We sat quietly in the corner, whispering close about loss. And I remembered why I loved her and I asked her why I drove her off.”

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Lion Cub released their new album American Buffalo this summer via the fine folks at Topshelf Records. Be sure to pick it up on CD or LP. Check out the video for “Flora/Fauna” below.