Receive Weekly Email and Text Message Updates:
Sign up for latest info on concerts, dining, promotions and more!
Go!

Related Stories ...

Most Popular

  • Dive Bars
    A handcrafted tour of the best, most obscure places to lean on a stool in Houston.
  • Getting Off
    Attorney Tyler Flood says he wins 80 percent of his clients' DWI trials, even if they were 100 percent drunk as a skunk.
  • Houston's Choice for Mayor
    Black Guy, Rich White Guy, Lesbian or Hispanic Republican
  • Burgers and Hash
    Lola, a modern diner in the Heights is dishing up some top-notch Texas short-order cooking.
  • Looking for a Bull Market
    Killen's Steakhouse in suburban Pearland is probably best during boom times.
Most Popular sponsored by

Reader's Picks

Top Recommendations

A short list of Houston's most popular hot spots.
user content provided by: LikeMe.net & Houston Press

National Features >

  • Village Voice

    The Great Walls of Chinatown

    With the exception of the electric rice cookers, this Bowery tenement could have come straight from the Nineteenth Century.

    By Elizabeth Dwoskin

  • Miami New Times

    Park or Die Tryin'

    From the homeless parking mafia to the meter fairy, finding a spot in Miami has taken a turn toward the surreal.

    By Gus Garcia-Roberts

  • City Pages

    The Baddest Men on the Planet

    Straight from the Sam's Club tire shop, Brett Rogers prepares to meet Fedor Emelianenko in mortal combat.

    By Bradley Campbell

Jenny Lewis, Heartless Bastards

Share

  • rss

By Chris Gray

Published on June 16, 2009 at 2:01pm

Two years ago, Rilo Kiley played a set to a sold-out Warehouse Live ballroom that left more than a few of the L.A. band's fans wishing their sardonic Saddle Creek soft-rock contained just a little more twang. The reason was Rabbit Fur Coat, RK lead singer Jenny Lewis's 2006 solo debut. Bolstered by impeccable country-soul arrangements and the Watson twins' sweet secular harmonies, Rabbit proved Lewis could mine her child-actress past (The Wizard, Troop Beverly Hills) for songs as emotionally blunt and self-lacerating as Rilo chestnuts like "Paint's Peeling" and "Portions for Foxes." Lewis's follow-up, last year's Acid Tongue, was a little more uneven, but also rocked a little harder on the strength of cuts like Elvis Costello duet "Carpetbaggers." She'll need that extra muscle Wednesday to avoid being blown off the stage by the Heartless Bastards, the Cincinnati/Austin trio whose singer Erika Wennerstrom is much throatier, but just as tortured, and whose music really can peel paint. The Bastards' latest album, The Mountain – a rough triangulation of the Band, the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin — wouldn't sound out of place in 1969, but as this year approaches the halfway point, it's easily one of 2009's best.