This miserable year so far hasn’t given us much to be excited about, but suddenly we have a new reason to stay relatively sane through the chaos: Rilo Kiley are back. The influential Los Angeles indie band led by Jenny Lewis and Blake Sennett played their first live shows since 2008 this year, and they seemed to all have gone really well!
“It couldn’t have happened any sooner; it feels like now is the time to share that joy and love with each other and with everyone else,” Lewis says of the reunion, with Sennett adding: “For some people, Rilo Kiley evokes a formative, emotional time in life, when you were maybe grasping for your place in the universe. We were, too.”
Oh, we sure were. 2004 was a hell of a drug!
But we’re so much older and wiser now, with the bills and debt to prove it, and Boston gets into the Rilo Kiley fun tonight (September 7) with a late-summer party at MGM Music Hall at Fenway. It goes down right next door to the My Chemical Romance reunion at actual Fenway Park, over on the other side of the outfield bleachers, making for a pretty interesting convergence of aughts-era ennui. Could we get some sort of cross-over appearance on one of those two stages?! Jenny Lewis belting out “Helena” or Gerard Way coming out for “Breakin’ Up”?!?! What opportunities dangle in the humid air.
Regardless of any of this, that or the other, this Rilo Kiley show here in town simply means that we all have a chance to hear, to sing, and to love “Portions For Foxes,” one of the most iconic and undeniable songs of the 21st century. Those four minutes or so are worth the price of whatever tickets are going for, and the ghosts of long-gone Allston dance parties will echo through the venue once there’s a pretty young thing in front of you and they’re real pretty and they’re real into you. This bad news, unlike that poor choice [we] made in 2004, is whatever you make of it.
A deal is a deal. Revisit the timeless beauty that is “Portions for Foxes” — which somehow is 21 years old now?!?! — and prepare for the post-Y2k kid family reunion across Lansdowne Street this evening.
RILO KILEY + NATALIE BERGMAN :: Sunday, September 7 at MGM Music Hall at Fenway, 2 Lansdowne St. in Boston, MA :: 7 p.m., all ages :: Event info :: Advance tickets