Album Reviews

 Jenny Lewis and Johnathan Rice were a couple when they made this REM indebted pop/rock album a few years ago. For all I know they are still a couple. I sure hope so because they make exquisite folk/rock music together, with both sharing guitar and bass playing.

 Jenny Lewis and Johnathan Rice were a couple when they made this REM indebted pop/rock album a few years ago. For all I know they are still a couple. I sure hope so because they make exquisite folk/rock music together, with both sharing guitar and bass playing.

This record steams with youthful exuberance. It's a music making love fest as these two collaborators bask in the warmth of their love. It's not a salacious come on kind of love either. It's the kind you want to share and have shared with you. You'll feed good listening to this record. And refreshed. 

They want you to know they're in love but they don't want you too close. That's why you get to see from a second story window a parking lot private moment  shared by hard bodied Jenny and doughy Johnathan on the back cover and on the jacket front, the picture of the couple is bathed in a detail obscuring deep red. Johnathan looks as if you are intruding on their privacy.

If a case needs to be made for the value of a full album's worth of music in the face of the barren pop singles market, this record makes it. 

What the record lacks in musical originality is more than made up for by the faultless execution. The hook-laden record is packed with memorable melodies, neatly packaged within superbly crafted tunes. The lyrics hold interest too. 

The nostalgic and tender "Switchblade" reminisces about the good times before success and describes feelings of  ambivalence about success and how it's never as perfect as imagined since to get something you have to give up something. 

That tune is one of the album's highlights for me but really there's not a bad song on a set that's brimming with faultless harmonies, well crafted arrangements and meticulous production, probably on a shoe-string budget.

Lewis's consistently superb work solo, in Rilo Kiley and with the Watson Twins has only been augmented with her hooking up with Rice. He's no Yoko to her John Lennon, that's for sure.

Recorded at Bright Street Recorders  by Pierre de Reeder and by Bright Eyes producer Mike Mogis at ARC Studios in Omaha Nebraska, the production and sound are as clear and cleanly rendered as the musical intent.

Mastering engineer John Golden and son J.J. are not averse to mastering from CD quality files so I'm not sure what was used here to cut lacquers for this LP pressed on crystal clear, well pressed vinyl, but you get the CD along with a fold out poster with credits on one side and another shot of the couple in their "drawing" room. 

In one of the songs Jenny sings that she doesn't believe in "sucking one's way to the top." She hardly has to judging by her string of excellent records.

Very highly recommended, particularly if you like tuneful, folk/rock in the style of early, efficient  REM combined with Byrds-ian harmonies.