1st October - Rilo Kiley's The Execution of All Things

 Artist – Album: Rilo Kiley – The Execution of All Things

Released:  1^st October 2002

Sounds Like: What Jenny Knew

Is there a name for when a song repeatedly surfaces across an album? I’ve Googled it but I’m struggling to even think of how to put it without getting half a million itunes support guides come up. Well, anyway, you know that? This has one. I think I’m a fan of them – the rollicking ‘I Was Born About Ten Thousand Years Ago’ on Elvis Country, the shady whistling on Billy Joel’s The Stranger, the game show skits on De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising. The one on The Execution of All Things is great too, a touching poem of young Jenny Lewis’s recollections of her parent’s divorce and her father moving to Alaska, named ‘And That’s How I Choose to Remember It’. Sentiments like “When dad moved out to a frozen land, The TV was jumping, it didn't feel right”, “My mom she cried about money and time, And how she felt older, And I didn't understand much” and “My dad was nice and seemed sorry for not being around” are aching memories of a tumultuous time in a kid’s life and particularly strike a nerve for those of us who were also from a broken home.

Of course, all that sounds a bit glum, but please don’t get to thinking this is a melodramatic or a mopey album. Brilliant, warm indie pop masks a lot of Lewis’ most painful lyrics on the likes of the title track and ‘Paint’s Peeling’, and on occasion she rouses herself into an entertaining queen bitch who takes no shit from no one, or else the symbol of stoic perseverance on the emblematic ‘A Better Son/Daughter’. Blake Sennet also pops up with a couple of Teenage Fanclub-esque sunshine songs on ‘So Long’ and ‘Three Hopeful Thoughts’ to further lighten the mood.

All in all, The Execution of All Things is a good album. Much like those segments or snippets of ‘And That’s How I Choose to Remember It’ that reappear throughout the record, it captures and intrigues you in the moment and sounds like something you weren’t supposed to hear, before flitting back out of the memory. Which is a good thing.

Albumaday... rating: 7/10

1.       The Good That Won’t Come Out – 4:31

2.       Paint’s Peeling – 3:20

3.       The Execution of All Things – 4:13

4.       So Long – 5:27

5.       Capturing Moods – 3:35

6.       A Better Son/Daughter – 4:39

7.       Hail to Whatever You Found in the Sunlight That Surrounds You – 3:20

8.       My Slumbering Heart – 5:36

9.       Three Hopeful Thoughts – 2:50

10.   With Arms Outstretched – 3:43

11.   Spectacular Views – 6:20

12.   And That’s How I Choose to Remember It – 0:04

Listen to ‘A Better Son/Daughter’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0sy7y54XAE