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Dec 22, 2010Jenny 'Rilo Kiley' Lewis, and Jonathan 'Just Recorded Under His Own Name' Rice's brand of folk-indie-pop--jangly guitars, sweetly shared harmonies, echoes of the Deep South--isn't groundbreaking, but probably wasn't supposed to be.
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Dec 22, 2010With the duo sharing vocals and occasionally bickering like Jack and Vera Duckworth, the pair's sound is comfortable – somewhere between 1980s indie jangle pop, 1960s Byrds-type guitar chiming and modern MOR. But the easy-listening melodies hide lyrical bite and references to everything from mental illness to sex with strangers.
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Q MagazineDec 20, 2010Barbed but Gregarious. [Dec 2020, p.110]
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The mood may be dark, but the record is a model of musical egalitarianism.
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Its casualness sometimes surfaces in its tossed-off jokes or sing-song melodies, but that only underscores that Jenny & Johnny are having a good time -- and it's a good time that's easy to share even if one of the hosts doesn't quite hold up his own end of the bargain.
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Unfortunately, without the kinetic energy that spurns the creative process when dealing with such an implicitly sultry concept, it's like Lewis and Rice are merely coasting on their own strengths, leaving the record to fall short on meeting its full potential. [Summer 2010, p.78]
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As a whole, it's not consistently buoyant enough to be a good pop record, and the politics that weigh down its middle section aren't sharp enough to make it into anything more than a middle section weighed down by some obvious politics.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 7 out of 10
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Mixed: 2 out of 10
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Negative: 1 out of 10
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Oct 25, 2010
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Aug 31, 2010This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view.