Rilo Kiley and Grand Ole Party at the Showbox Saturday

The unfortunately named Grand Ole Party opened for Rilo Kiley Saturday night to an audience presumably not too familiar with their work. GOP have a strong, simple, raw kind of sound, not unlike White Stripes or Sweet 75, kind of directionless and inert, but impressive and energetic nonetheless. They ended the set with the first song on Humanimals, "Look Out Young Son," which after a couple of listens sounds like the strongest effort on the disc.

The less said about the second band the better. The lead singer looked like Bruce McCulloch from Kids In The Hall wearing a Jesus wig and doing a vapid rock star sketch. There was some bombed attempt at humor -- something about coyotes killing and eating Arnold Schwarzenegger's heart and guts in front of his kids -- that could have been funny if it had been delivered properly (see Bill Hicks on killing Bush 1), but the delivery was so bad even hardcore Lefty Seattle only gave strained laughter and one hoot of solidarity from some psychopath in the audience (for the record, not Seattlest) then crickets chirping, tumbleweeds rolling, silence. Fucking inane.

The crowd was obviously there for headliner Rilo Kiley with much of the audience singing along to all those songs that enjoyed so much heavy rotation on KEXP back in the day that they became tattooed on the cerebral cortex of Seattlest's collective hive mind. It almost goes without saying that Jenny Lewis looked ferociously hot in a mini-skirt, but still has to be noted for the record. Predictably, experiencing the live renditions of the new songs from Under the Blacklight was a vast improvement over hearing them on the disc, which has enjoyed mixed reviews at best -- the customer comments on Amazon seem to get it right more so than the incoherent mess of a review on Pitchfork that's not worth reading or linking to. Songs like "Close Call," which sound on the CD like incidental music for deodorant commercials, are a lot more impressive when you see exactly how much soul and heart Lewis has to belt out in to them. We were bloviating on this observation as we were leaving and these two young, eavesdropping, 16-year-old-looking girls turned around and told us that they had just said the exact same thing.