Rabbit Fur Coat
With this selection of countrified and atmospheric confessional ditties, the lead singer of L.A.’s Rilo Kiley hints at Patsy Cline but more closely invokes Dusty Springfield. Jenny Lewis ponders what’s real and what love’s all about anyway while the Watsons provide pitch-perfect gospel background harmonies. All songs are originals, save an excellent cover of the Traveling Wilburys’ “Handle with Care.” Lewis is secular, inconsolable, and she saw you in Vegas, but it wasn’t pretty. Her dark tales of working-class woes and the false status symbols (alluded to in the title) that often accompany them contain a strain of darkly ironic self-analysis. All this works because the droll but witty renditions of her search for meaning avoid the cutesy in favor of an intimate sappiness.