Rilo Kiley’s First Dallas Show in 17 Years Brought Back the 2000s

One generation slowly withers; another generation blossoms.

So it is in this season of bands of a particular vintage — the halcyon, analog days of the late 1990s and early 2000s — finding their way back in front of audiences. Forget semaglutides: The drug of choice for the late 40s and early 50s crowd, these days, is nostalgia.

How else to explain the faintly rapturous faces populating the floor and the balcony of The Bomb Factory Thursday night? Tote bags slung over shoulders, T-shirts and posters fervently gripped as the band of the hour, Rilo Kiley, filtered out onto the stage for its first Dallas appearance in 17 years.

The quartet — Jenny Lewis, Blake Sennett, Pierre de Reeder and Jason Boesel — is filled out by a fifth member on this tour (multi-instrumentalist Harrison Whitford), but performed as if no time had passed.

The roughly 90-minute set was no more and no less than it needed to be, a handsomely mounted reminder of this group’s wonderfully durable songs, delivered to an audience only too happy to sing along at top volume, individually lost in a haze of remembrance.

Kicking off with “The Execution of All Things,” the title track of its 2002 sophomore LP, the Los Angeles-based band slipped easily into its groove, situated on a stage decorated only with a backdrop of lights that shifted between static and undulating.

Lewis’ vocals have lost a touch of sweetness with time, the honey now mixed, appealingly, with a bit of grit, while Sennett’s own tenor is a tad more frayed. However, the unavoidable concessions to growing older suit the songs, which were always a finely calibrated blend of cynicism and hope to begin with.

The deadpan wit of Rilo Kiley’s songbook was a delight, as the group worked its way through staples like the strutting “The Moneymaker,” the swooning, Phil Spector-ish “I Never” and the blackly comic “It’s a Hit” (“But it’s a sin when success complains / And your writer’s block, it don’t mean shit / Just throw it against the wall and see what sticks / Gotta write a hit, I think this is it,” goes one chorus).

Given the fact the band has no new material to promote, the night’s setlist was more or less distributed evenly across the back catalog, with only the group’s 2001 debut, Take Off and Landings, getting short shrift.

The band was also in a buoyant mood: “Shit, Blake, this is great,” Lewis said near the evening’s midpoint. Knowing shrieks erupted across the room at various points as long-loved songs were offered up (the opening notes of “I Never,” in particular, proved pleasing). Rilo Kiley, in this latest iteration, felt a bit brawnier and more discursive — its songs tend to rely on precise turns of phrase and sly grace notes, so to hear the band play them with a bit more bite — “The Moneymaker,” for instance, didn’t bounce so much as stomp Thursday, but the effect worked in the song’s favor — was a pleasant surprise, somewhat shaking off the cobwebs.

The gathered also didn’t hesitate to take over completely: The last verse of “With Arms Outstretched,” a penultimate track from The Execution of All Things, was sung with little prompting from Lewis, who wore a happily bemused grin as she watched the fans sing for her.

It was a fitting embodiment of the mood inside The Bomb Factory, a long-hoped-for reunion finally transpiring, and a fresh chance to bask in the fond memories associated with the songs filling in the air before us all in the here and now.

See more photos from Thursday’s show: