November / December 2002 - Food for Thought

CD Review

Rilo Kiley
Take Offs and Landings
Barsuk Records

Review by Allison Dubinsky

Ah, the mess of contradictions that is California: sunshine, surfing, beaches and beauty versus earthquakes, pollution, drought and beastly traffic jams. No wonder Jenny Lewis, Rilo Kiley�s singer/songwriter/keyboardist, has a cavalier attitude toward the whole thing. �They say California is a recipe for a black hole/and I say I�ve got my best shoes on, I�m ready to go,� Lewis sings in �Pictures of Success� on Take Offs and Landings, the Los Angeles band�s first full-length album. You can almost see her gracefully stepping over some imaginary event horizon, poised in anticipation of the incomparable sweetness of oblivion. Together, Lewis, Blake Sennett (singer/songwriter), Pierre de Reeder (bass,/guitar) and Dave Rock (drums) write clever, folky songs that are surprisingly tough and twangy underneath sunny indie pop hooks and gorgeous production.

Lewis� songs are the ones that stand out (no offense to Sennett, whose voice is fine but more of the typical, forlorn indie-boy variety). Her voice is quirky and a little bit brazen, like the very tall, very pretty girl at your high school dance who had a 4.0 GPA and Manic-Panicked red hair. Lines like �It�s just that my heart gets rejected by my veins/and sometimes planes they smash up in the sky/and sometimes lonely hearts they just get lonelier� (�Wires and Waves�) are delivered without even a smidgen of self-pity or melodrama. Instead, the words end up winding through your head repeatedly, like lovely lyrical ribbons of disaster.

Last year, �Pictures of Success� played in the background of an episode of �Buffy the Vampire Slayer.� It�s not surprising that Buffy Summers would put Rilo Kiley in her CD player � when Lewis sings �I�m a modern girl/but I fold in half so easily,� she could be describing Ms. Summers herself: blonde demon-destroying virtuoso by night, overwhelmed and oft-smitten college student by day. Like a lot of us, the members of Rilo Kiley are trying to figure out how to build stable relationships, or any relationships at all, while living on very unstable ground. NG

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Tara Jane O�Neil
TKO
(BMI)

Review by Anne Adams

Have you ever been to a performance art show? If so, then you know what to expect: installations of strange paper structures, faint clanging and bumping noises, and people running around doing symbolic things in ethereal clothes. Everything in the room is designed to capture your attention. Usually the whole shebang is also engineered for easy tear-down when the moment is over. Enter Tara Jane O�Neil, the musician who does for music what performance art does for Art.

O�Neil�s latest album, "TKO," is a blend of organic percussion, delicate harmonies and white noise. It creates subtle chaos and embraces quiet madness, casting a dissonant, haunting and temporary spell. Temporary because, although O�Neil�s Bjork-like, whimsical vocals and skeletal trip-hop beats command one to stop and listen, the melodies do not build up to unforgettable conclusions, nor do they blend in with the atmosphere of a room. They lock the listener in limbo between enjoyment and intensity, but do not fully deliver either. It is, if nothing else, very post-modern. Hapless yet poignant � jarring, then soothing � it promises nothing, yet allows us a glimpse of something lovely and then dismantles itself like tissue paper in the wind, as though it was never there.

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