Dirty Disco Vibe

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It’s an album full of question marks, and the naughty nurses fill in the blanks.

They strut and glower across the screen, tattooed and a little menacing, like leggy razor blades.

There’s nothing implied by their presence: They’re eye candy, meant to titillate, to arouse, and that’s it.

It’s this kind of laissez faire carnality that goes a long way toward defining the latest disc from popsters Rilo Kiley, "Under the Blacklight," an album largely posited on bed hopping and its consequences that often feels like it was penned from between the sheets.

The first video for the album, "The Moneymaker," is a seedy romp through adult video shops and dark halls with the aforementioned porn star nurses.

It’s dingy and dirty, sex without the sentiment.

The clip is a fitting entry point to "Blacklight," Rilo Kiley’s most diffuse, libidinal offering, a sexually liberated effort from a band that’s occasionally benefitted from male-female tension.

The band’s two prominent songwriters, singer/bassist Jenny Lewis and singer/guitarist Blake Sennett, were once in a relationship with one another, and this album occasionally revels in breaking up and moving on.

"I never felt so wicked as when I willed our love to die," Lewis sings on the album-opening slow-burn "Silver Lining," and whether she’s speaking to Sennett doesn’t matter: It’s the tug of war between the sexes that’s at issue here.

"At this point, it’s easy to forget that they were ever a couple, but I think their dynamic will eternally be affected by their previous relationship," drummer Jason Boesel says of Lewis’ and Sennett’s past together. "That never goes away between two people, for better or for worse. They get along quite well, and they’ve both developed these autonomous lives. It’s an interesting dynamic."

"Dynamic" is the operative word here, one that encapsulates "Blacklight." It’s Rilo Kiley’s most uninhibited album, both sonically and lyrically, with Lewis singing sweetly of three-ways ("Dejalo") and passionate, all-night encounters ("Smoke Detector") over a shifting backdrop of layered, doo-wop harmonies, cotton candy synth lines and irrepressible beats.

It’s a dance floor-friendly record, an album of hard grooves and soft curves that pauses only intermittently to catch its breath.

"I think we kind of went into it with that mind-set," Boesel says of the album’s dirty disco vibe. "The producers that we worked with really facilitated that. Jason Lader and Mike Elizondo are both bass players, so we really zoomed in on the rhythm section and tried to simplify the grooves and make them as dancey as we could without being oversimplified or boring."

To that end, "Blacklight" is a rousing success, a much bawdier, fuller-sounding record than this band has been known for in the past, when their pastoral, folk-inflected indie rock made them underground favorites.That’s a position that Rilo Kiley no longer occupies, and they’re well aware of how this has affected their fan base.

"Some of them feel a bit betrayed," Boesel notes. "To keep yourself interested as an artist, it’s a guarantee that you’re going to lose some fans down the road."

But this bunch always has seemed destined for something bigger, and this begins to come to fruition on "Blacklight," a very confident sounding disc that makes a welcome — and unabashed — play for the pop charts.

Rilo Kiley got a taste of what it’s like to be a band on just about the biggest scale imaginable when they opened a Coldplay arena jaunt in 2005, which left some members of the band wondering if that’s a status that they’d ever want for themselves.

"It makes for an interesting potential future," Boesel says. "I think Jenny came away from that tour pretty resolute in not wanting that level of popularity and exposure. I don’t think she craved any sort of giant shows. But it’s always been a dream of mine to play shows like that and be in a band that can fill a stadium. That sounds fun. I think out of the band, I had the most fun out of that tour."

There’s plenty of good — and bad — times to be had on the album that’s followed in the wake of that experience, as "Blacklight" certainly qualifies as a bipolar listen.

But ultimately, the album sounds like a celebration, a band starting to fully realize itself, in the bedroom and beyond.

"If I were to show my career path thus far to my 14-year-old self, my 14-year-old self would be pretty stoked," Boesel says with a chuckle. "But my 30-year-old self right now is like, ‘Well, I feel like we’ve got a long ways to go.’ It’s kind of a weird cycle, as you accomplish things, they seem less like accomplishments. I think that’s all of our personalties. We’ve always sort of looked forward and never back."