Lewis is Cleverly Emotive on "The Voyager"

In the six years since her most recent solo album, Jenny Lewis has lost both her father and her band, Rilo Kiley. She has admitted that the events affected her deeply and even at one point prompted a breakdown; one might expect, then, that “The Voyager” should be brimming with grief, a collection of mournful acoustic tunes in the vein of 2008’s “Acid Tongue.” But Lewis has emerged from the past few years in a rainbow-patterned suit, which constitutes “The Voyager”’s album artwork, and her music puts forward the same message as her outfit. Lewis’s folksy vocals, clever writing, and upbeat instrumentation have come together magnificently to create an album equal parts emotionally affecting and irresistibly fun.

Musically, “The Voyager” is reminiscent less of Lewis’s prior solo work and more of Rilo Kiley’s strongest album, 2007’s “Under the Blacklight.” As both albums testify, Lewis operates most effectively in strong and steady rhythms and uncluttered instrumentation. From the opening piano chords of “Head Underwater,” the album has an infectious pulse; though not rhythmically complex, each song is based off a strong, solid beat. This is Lewis’s art: to turn a couple guitars, a drum set, the occasional tambourine or violin, and harmonically interesting backing vocals into something absolutely addictive. “Love U Forever,” the album’s whimsically-titled penultimate track, is perhaps her greatest accomplishment in this regard. A simple transition from the minor key of the verse to the major key of the chorus perfectly captures the youthful ebullience of the song’s title.

But what is truly remarkable about “Love U Forever,” and indeed the album as a whole, is the dissonance Lewis crafts between the instrumentation of her songs and the actual meaning of her lyrics. The narrator of “Love U Forever” is engaged, unable to pursue this newfound love. The first line of the album is “I’ve been wearing all black since the day it started”; indeed, “Head Underwater” as a whole is a perfectly disorienting juxtaposition of energetic instrumentation with lyrics about hitting rock bottom. This is where Lewis injects the sense of tragedy one might have expected the album to have. Yet she manages to keep each song fun: she carefully avoids bogging down her lively style with linguistic self-seriousness and instead writes in a clever, subtle fashion that adds complexity instead of outright gravity. Perhaps this is most obvious in “Just One of the Guys,” an amusing musical romp that addresses emotionally complex material: Lewis laments that she can’t truly be one of the guys because she can only see herself as another “lady without a baby.” In this fashion, the song addresses motherhood and fertility in a tangential fashion, and in doing so accesses the emotional repercussions of the issue without their associated gravity. Lewis has clearly mastered this sort of lyrical light touch; it is difficult to imagine any other artist addressing what she does with the same whimsicality.

This whimsy pervades nearly every song on the album until one reaches “The Voyager,” its final track. Though Lewis has impeccably struck her characteristic energetic tone in the album as a whole, the one moment when she breaks from it is just as much a success. The song is carried almost entirely by her voice and acoustic guitar, occasionally coupled with marimba and strings; the sound she creates is simultaneously simple and otherworldly, particularly when she incorporates vocal harmony. When she sings, “If you want to get to heaven, get out of this world,” she finally brings the album’s subtle tragedy into the open; in this way, though it is so different from what precedes it, the title track constitutes a perfect conclusion. Lewis is equally powerful when she exemplifies what she does best and when she breaks away from it. “The Voyager” ideally exemplifies both her mastery of her own particular style and her versatility as an artist.

—Staff writer Grace E. Huckins can be reached at grace.huckins@thecrimson.com.