Rilo Kiley's reunion is right on time at Just Like Heaven
'Can you believe,' Jenny Lewis asked, 'this is our third show in 17 years?'
Wearing the same outfit she'd worn at the first two — polka-dot mini-dress, white ruffle socks, a glittering tiara perched atop her head — Lewis was onstage Saturday night with her band Rilo Kiley at the Just Like Heaven festival in Pasadena.
'It's truly amazing to be here with you all,' she told the crowd of thousands spread across the leafy grounds surrounding the Rose Bowl. 'But mostly,' she added, turning to her bandmates, 'it's amazing to be here with you all.'
One of the defining Los Angeles rock bands of the last quarter-century, Rilo Kiley formed in 1998 — both Lewis and the group's other singer and songwriter, Blake Sennett, had been child actors — then spent the next decade steadily approaching the big time with clever if jaundiced songs about sex, bad decisions and the Hollywood dream machine. Yet just as the band was poised to blow up, Rilo Kiley split amid creative and personal tensions between Lewis and Sennett, who'd also been romantically involved. Now, for the first time since 2008, the group — rounded out by Pierre De Reeder and Jason Boesel — is on the road playing shows again; its reunion tour launched last week with gigs in San Luis Obispo and Ojai and is scheduled to run through the fall.
The timing makes sense, given that Lewis over the intervening years has become something of an older-sister figure for a subsequent generation or two of smart young musicians writing about all the ways the world can disappoint a woman in her 20s. (Think Phoebe Bridgers, think Haim, think Olivia Rodrigo.)
Then again, nostalgia is rarely required to justify itself, as Just Like Heaven made clear. A fixture of the Southern California festival landscape since 2019, this annual show brings together veterans of early-2000s indie rock to relive memories of an era before streaming and social media remade pop music; other acts high on the bill this year included Vampire Weekend, TV on the Radio, Bloc Party, the Drums and Toro y Moi.
Near the end of its headlining set on Saturday, Vampire Weekend offered up what frontman Ezra Koenig called 'a salute to indie' — strung-together covers of period hits by Phoenix, Tame Impala, Beach House, Grizzly Bear and TV on the Radio — in a slot the band typically dedicates to audience requests for oldies like 'Don't Stop Believin' ' or 'Dancing in the Dark.' That Grizzly Bear's 'Two Weeks' now qualifies as a classic was a fact nobody seemed to need convincing.
Indeed, Lewis has said that part of what led her to reconvene Rilo Kiley was the huge success of a recent reunion tour by the Postal Service, the electro-pop side project that she and Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard introduced in 2003 and which last year headlined Just Like Heaven after earlier selling out three nights at the Hollywood Bowl.
Yet if all that eagerness to reminisce made easy pickings of folks in Pasadena, Rilo Kiley played with more muscle and panache than it needed to on Saturday in an hour-long set that showcased the band's impressive versatility.
'The Execution of All Things' and 'With Arms Outstretched' were crisp and strummy, while 'The Moneymaker' rode a raunchy soul-rock groove and 'Dreamworld' evoked the glossy menace of mid-'70s Fleetwood Mac. Now as during the group's heyday, what elevated the performance was Lewis' skill as a storyteller: the torch-song melancholy she found in 'I Never,' about a woman betting too much on a relationship, and the perfectly soapy romantic drama of 'Does He Love You?' in which she plays two of the three parts in a doomed love triangle. For the latter, she grabbed a video camera and roamed the stage, sending footage of her bandmates to the giant screen behind her — not just the star of the Rilo Kiley show but its director too.
On Spotify, the band's biggest song is the coolly self-assured 'Silver Lining,' from its darkly funny final LP, 'Under the Blacklight,' and here Lewis delivered it with a swaggy nonchalance. But the true heads know that Rilo Kiley's real should've-been-a-hit was 2004's sly yet ebullient 'Portions for Foxes' — 'The talking leads to touching / And the touching leads to sex,' goes one key line — which is why the group finished with the song at Just Like Heaven.
As she sauntered offstage, Lewis blew a kiss to the crowd, then jumped back to her microphone, grabbed a Modelo she'd left behind and took a sip through a straw.
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