“Can you believe,” Jenny Lewis requested, “this is our third show in 17 years?”
Sporting the identical outfit she’d worn on the first two — polka-dot mini-dress, white ruffle socks, a glittering tiara perched atop her head — Lewis was onstage Saturday night time together with her band Rilo Kiley on the Simply Like Heaven pageant in Pasadena.
“It’s truly amazing to be here with you all,” she informed the gang of hundreds unfold throughout the leafy grounds surrounding the Rose Bowl. “But mostly,” she added, turning to her bandmates, “it’s amazing to be here with you all.”
Jenny Lewis performs.
(Eric Thayer/For The Occasions)
One of many defining Los Angeles rock bands of the final quarter-century, Rilo Kiley shaped in 1998 — each Lewis and the group’s different singer and songwriter, Blake Sennett, had been youngster actors — then spent the subsequent decade steadily approaching the massive time with intelligent if jaundiced songs about intercourse, unhealthy selections and the Hollywood dream machine. But simply because the band was poised to explode, Rilo Kiley break up amid artistic and private tensions between Lewis and Sennett, who’d additionally been romantically concerned. Now, for the primary time since 2008, the group — rounded out by Pierre De Reeder and Jason Boesel — is on the street taking part in reveals once more; its reunion tour launched final week with gigs in San Luis Obispo and Ojai and is scheduled to run by the autumn.
The timing is sensible, on condition that Lewis over the intervening years has turn out to be one thing of an older-sister determine for a subsequent era or two of sensible younger musicians writing about all of the methods the world can disappoint a girl in her 20s. (Assume Phoebe Bridgers, suppose Haim, suppose Olivia Rodrigo.)
Then once more, nostalgia isn’t required to justify itself, as Simply Like Heaven made clear. A fixture of the Southern California pageant panorama since 2019, this annual present brings collectively veterans of early-2000s indie rock to relive recollections of an period earlier than streaming and social media remade pop music; different acts excessive on the invoice this 12 months included Vampire Weekend, TV on the Radio, Bloc Social gathering, the Drums and Toro y Moi.
Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend performs.
(Eric Thayer/For The Occasions)
Close to the tip of its headlining set on Saturday, Vampire Weekend provided up what frontman Ezra Koenig known as “a salute to indie” — strung-together covers of interval hits by Phoenix, Tame Impala, Seashore Home, Grizzly Bear and TV on the Radio — in a slot the band usually dedicates to viewers requests for oldies like “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” or “Dancing in the Dark.” That Grizzly Bear’s “Two Weeks” now qualifies as a traditional was a truth no person appeared to want convincing.
Certainly, Lewis has mentioned that a part of what led her to reconvene Rilo Kiley was the massive success of a current reunion tour by the Postal Service, the electro-pop aspect venture that she and Demise Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard launched in 2003 and which final 12 months headlined Simply Like Heaven after earlier promoting out three nights on the Hollywood Bowl.
But if all that eagerness to reminisce made simple pickings of parents in Pasadena, Rilo Kiley performed with extra muscle and panache than it wanted to on Saturday in an hour-long set that showcased the band’s spectacular versatility.
Tunde Adebimpe performs with TV on the Radio.
(Eric Thayer/For The Occasions)
“The Execution of All Things” and “With Arms Outstretched” had been crisp and strummy, whereas “The Moneymaker” rode a raunchy soul-rock groove and “Dreamworld” evoked the shiny menace of mid-’70s Fleetwood Mac. Now as in the course of the group’s heyday, what elevated the efficiency was Lewis’ ability as a storyteller: the torch-song melancholy she present in “I Never,” a few girl betting an excessive amount of on a relationship, and the superbly soapy romantic drama of “Does He Love You?” during which she performs two of the three elements in a doomed love triangle. For the latter, she grabbed a video digital camera and roamed the stage, sending footage of her bandmates to the enormous display behind her — not simply the star of the Rilo Kiley present however its director too.
On Spotify, the band’s largest tune is the coolly confident “Silver Lining,” from its darkly humorous last LP, “Under the Blacklight,” and right here Lewis delivered it with a swaggy nonchalance. However the true heads know that Rilo Kiley’s actual ought to’ve-been-a-hit was 2004’s sly but ebullient “Portions for Foxes” — “The talking leads to touching / And the touching leads to sex,” goes one key line — which is why the group completed with the tune at Simply Like Heaven.
As she sauntered offstage, Lewis blew a kiss to the gang, then jumped again to her microphone, grabbed a Modelo she’d left behind and took a sip by a straw.
Followers at Saturday’s Simply Like Heaven pageant in Pasadena.
(Eric Thayer/For The Occasions)
