Rilo Kiley - More Adventurous

It's probably about time that I use some posts talking about the music that's passing through my CD player these days. Apologies to those of you at work that have already heard portions of this album, I'll come up with something new for next time.

Rilo Kiley is an LA indie pop band most well-known for its female lead Jenny Lewis. She started out in Hollywood as a child actress, most known in nerd circles as Fred Savage's mysterious red-headed companion in the Nintendo film The Wizard, before moving on to a music career.

Their third album, "More Adventurous" came out back in 2004 and landed on a lot of the year's best album lists, crowning them as indie darlings in the process. We've had it for awhile, but it's spent a lot of time languishing on the shelf until now. I'm a fan because a lot of the songs are musically clever without sounding too slick. There's a lot of unique ornamentation that makes choruses and verses distinct, as opposed to the bland repetition you typically hear on the radio. For example, notice how "It's a Hit" has three verses (all different) before ever hitting the main refrain. Yes, the lyrics can get a tidge angsty, but that comes with the territory sometimes.

In total, Rilo Kiley has four albums as well as Jenny Lewis' two solo albums. I'll probably be tracking more down in the future.

Listening Station:
"It's a Hit"
"Portions for Foxes" - just a bit, as seen in the pilot of Grey's Anatomy... who knew?
"More Adventurous"/"Ripchord"/"Portions for Foxes" - from an in-studio performance at our local NPR station. Sorry you have to suffer through the interview portion. Click the "Listen (128k mp3)" link for an iTunes style playlist.

There are a bunch of YouTube concert videos if you look around, but you can hear the crowd better than the band on most of them so I won't bother linking.