Rilo Kiley

Wow. Jenny Lewis returns from a surprise solo success and helps her band Rilo Kiley release one of the best albums of 2007. The band keeps their indie identity while giving each track the kind of pop-rock polish that only the truly talented can pull off. There isn't a bum song here, and tunes like "Silver Lining" and "15" deserve to be hits. The duet "Dreamworld" sounds like an alternative radio staple circa 1984, and "Dejalo" is the best Madonna song that the sinewy starlet has never recorded.

Because Rilo Kiley's More Adventurous was a triumph of the well-made narrative song, its markedly terser and beatier follow-up, which is also the band's true major-label debut, will be accused of sellout. Instead, it's yet more adventurous, a prosperous band's challenge to its comfortable cult. Always too cute for serious indie cred, Jenny Lewis slips four songs about dangerous sex in which she herself might be indulging--right now, in her pretty prosperity--into music that's defined rather than just decorated by its stylistic flirtations. Repetitive if not wordless refrains pop up everywhere, one in Spanish with a Latin beat; here there's a soul horn section, there a Fleetwood Mac homage, there a synth outro, and almost nowhere much guitar-band alt-rock. The emotions aren't as detailed as in the past. But they're no less intense. (Grade - ****)