More Adventurous - Rilo Kiley

Every once and a while you come across a band that is obviously going places. Excitedly, you follow the band a bit too closely and wait for them to break open on a larger scale, though there's a small part of you that wants the band to stay rather unknown, a thing you get to keep for your own, far away from the teeming masses. After releasing their brilliant sophomore album, The Execution of All Things, Rilo Kiley toured around the country and won over a base of fans that quickly felt protective of their music; people like me, who could barely go more than a couple of days without listening to them, long after each and every song had burned itself into memory. But they weren't through taking chances. Now, having left the warm embrace of Saddle Creek records (home to Bright Eyes, Cursive, and Azure Ray among others) in lieu of starting up their own label, Beaute/Brute, the band slowly set about breaking through on their own terms.

Thus, with this week's release of their third album, More Adventurous, I am afraid that this band is simply too good to be able to keep itself a secret for very much longer. They have too much musical talent, write songs that are far too catchy, and have a magnetic and beautiful leader in one Jenny Lewis. More Adventurous will definitely open many doors for this band, and to some extent it almost seems calculated to achieve a bit of mainstream crossover appeal (a la Modest Mouse this summer), but this hardly means the music has suffered for it in the least. This is a different album than Execution, to be sure, and some elitist fans are already crying "sell out!" because Rilo Kiley didn't record the exact same album all over again. But those people are snobs who wouldn't know good music if it bit them on the knee, and you should ignore their whining diatribes. More Adventurous is fantastic.

Kicking off with the bitterly cynical, but marvelously upbeat "It's a Hit!", Lewis and company begin their verbal assault on the mainstream within the confines of a song that seems musically destined to appeal to it (think "In Bloom" perhaps, for comparison). It's quickly followed by "Does He Love You?", a gradually unfolding story of love, infidelity, broken hearts and broken dreams, that ends in a crashing wave of orchestral swells.

Next up is the insanely enjoyable "Portions for Foxes", the song on the album that seems most destined for radio greatness (be that good or bad). With its catchy guitar melodies and sexy bad-girl chorus refrains (Baby I'm bad news...), "Foxes" is arguably the strongest single the band has recorded to date and will likely be released as such at some point this year. If it does, you'll be hearing an awful lot of it. If it doesn't, someone should be losing their job.

From there the album really begins to hit its stride, as it moves through good tracks ("Ripchord", "Accidental Deth") and outstanding ones ("I Never", "Absence of God", "More Adventurous"), showcasing a band that is more than willing to try new things without ever losing its almost inherent listenablity (which is now a word, because I said so). Veering from acoustic country to 50s style motown to new-wave 80s, the ship is always kept on course by the lyrical and vocal prowess of Ms. Lewis and the nimble guitar work of Blake Sennett.

The album winds down with two of its finest songs, "A Man/Me/then Jim" and "It Just Is". "Jim" is arguably the album's single strongest moment (and my favorite song on the whole record), chronicling the slow fade of love against a relaxed and inviting musical backdrop. "It Just Is", a song penned for the late Elliott Smith on the occasion of his death (they played a few shows with him in early 2003). It's a moving song that pays tribute to Smith in a way even he probably wouldn't have minded (And this loss isn't good enough for sorrow or inspiration...it's such a loss for the good guys afraid of this life, that it just is...).

More Adventurous will be a lot of things to a lot of different people. It is an important step for Rilo Kiley and a sign to its growing number of fans that the band will not merely be releasing the same type of record over and over again, but rather will take chances and remain mercurial. Gone forever is the cutesy indie band with two former child television stars and in its place we now find a solid group of musicians putting out some of the finest music being made today. And that can hardly be a bad thing.