Concert Review: Jenny Lewis @ Union Transfer
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
Right up until "A Better Son/Daughter," I was vaguely bored by most of what Jenny Lewis and her band came up with at the very-sold-out Union Transfer on Tuesday. But that song put things into perspective: It’s not her, it’s me. Or it’s 50/50.
[ 11/11 ] Right up until "A Better Son/Daughter," I was vaguely bored by most of what Jenny Lewis and her band came up with at the very-sold-out Union Transfer on Tuesday. But that song put things into perspective: It’s not her, it’s me. Or it’s 50/50.
All her midtempo solo music, all those hooks and hip-shaking rhythms and oddly sunny choruses, it’s not like it sucks. The music (defined by synths and three tamed guitars) is catchy and inventive. It allows plenty of opportunity for Lewis to show off that lovely, explosive voice. But it’s miles away from the beautifully doomed music she made with Rilo Kiley, the sound we loved when we first loved her. This stuff doesn’t benefit from increased volume. It’s too soft and caramelized for that. It’s gentle when it challenges, and subtly optimistic.
But "A Better Son/Daughter," that’s another story. Recorded when Rilo Kiley could do no wrong, the song sums up angles of the modern condition in a way nobody else seemed capable. Seems capable. Lewis, like you, me and everybody, is not the same person she was when she wrote it at the beginning of the last decade. But, at the show — with these giant bouncing balloons bopping around everywhere sometimes bursting against the venue’s sharpest parts — we could pretend now was still then, when Lewis said we had to fight our way through this world.
She knows it’s weird, the way things have worked out. She commented on the “trippy juxtaposition” of that song being paired with those balloons when she came out for a second encore in jeans and a t-shirt. By that point, we were seeing eye-to-eye on some things. Lewis said we’d be happy one day and now she is. Nothing wrong with that.
