Rilo Kiley’s songs are best when they’re campy yet affecting, like early ’90s kids’ TV shows. Their first three records had that same sort of blood flowing through them. It probably had something to do with guitarist Blake Sennett having a role on both "Salute Your Shorts" and "Boy Meets World" as a child. The records are reminiscent of that feeling of nostalgia — the dead drone of drama long gone. It all worked together, record by record, to give the band a resonating indie sound compounded by the delicate voice of a white-skinned and black-haired wholesome fairy girl. But what’s Under The Blacklight? There’s definitely a new side of the band exposed, but, as with many things put under a blacklight, it’s not especially flattering. The majority of the songs are bizarre, some heartlessly so. Comprised of 37 minutes of music, the record is an assemblage of cold, machine-like instruments, along with lead singer Kelly Lewis’s vocals that are as crass and lifeless as ever. There is the “Silver Lining,” however, which lives up to its name. It actually sounds human, albeit as a heartwarming soundtrack to a budding relationship montage from a chick flick. Lewis is misleading about her love life with her lyric in the chorus — "Hooray hooray, I'm your silver lining/ Hooray hooray, but now I'm gold” — because the music video for this song shows her walking out on her would-have-been husband Sennett, the guitarist, in a wedding. Does that mean she has no emotions? Well… yeah, that’s the vibe one gets after listening to the record. “The Moneymaker” is the first single. It's a dark and creepy-sounding porno song with heavy guitar riffs. The verse of the song is skeletal, consisting of a funky climbing bass line and Lewis’s voice, which sounds brittle in her awkward attempt to mimic pornographic love sounds. The remainder of the song is bloated with a repetitious melody played on the guitar with ear-grating, treble-to-the-max robo-distortion. This song is about sex, and their music video is all about porn stars. The developing pattern here is, “Screw commitment — Let’s just screw each other.” “Dejalo” opens up in a grand fashion, featuring Lewis majestically singing like a Las Vegas showgirl. The song then trades off between the colorful Vegas strip musical imagery and the verse with Lewis's sassy singing fattened by a twirling flutter of envelope-filtered guitar and bass notes. Lewis is singing about gross stuff again, though. She intones with affected boredom that her mother is an atheist, who will join Lewis and her man in bed for a threesome. It’s good that Lewis is photogenic, otherwise that’d be a pretty bad tableau. There are four more songs on the record after “Dejalo,” but they’re all equally unimpressive. “Smoke Detector” would be okay if it wasn’t for the annoying sexual innuendoes, which already run rampant on the record. It’s all a flimsy facade trying to cover up the fact that Lewis’s lyrics are nothing more than skin deep. Just like a porn flick, if there’s enough titillation, people may forget that there’s no plot. Thankfully, Under The Blacklight is out of character for Rilo Kiley — they’re not actually this shallow. Take Offs and Landings, Rilo Kiley’s first record, shows a band that wears carefully polished but battle-hardened armor. It proves they have the ingredients to make tasty musical concoctions. For example, “Pictures Of Success” has Lewis sounding her fairy-tale cutest and her sharpest and most pungent lyrically, while the instrumentation — a million times more nerd-chic catchy and melodramatic than even Weezer at their best — lives underneath, like a primordial beast. What Under The Blacklight reveals is a band that stepped outside their claimed territory and got lost. There’s a reason why Rilo Kiley achieved a consistent and identifiable sound on their first three records: It was the product of all the members finding their interrelated and co-dependent niches. That's when a band fuses together and rings like a bell. Regardless of whether they tried to go for something new on Under The Blacklight, the result is an album that sounds like a dampened bell — clashing metallic sounds but no ring. It's unfocused, unnatural, crass and vain. 1 1/2 stars out of 5