The release of her genuinely country-sounding Rabbit Fur Coat, followed by Rilo Kiley's synthetically slick Under The Black Light could conceivably have marked the initial split of Jenny Lewis' musical persona as she emerged from the indie minor leagues. Perhaps on her solo albums, she would adhere to a path of development similar to that of Neko Case, while in the context of a full band expand to a broader palette of sounds than Rilo Kiley's popified country roots originally allowed. With the release of Acid Tongue, the verdict is in - and if you were banking on Jenny Lewis to refine her attempts at becoming another traditional country chanteuse, think again.

Sonically, Acid Tongue shoots for the same fussed-over sound as Under The Black Light, which suggests that, in reality, the latter album marked the birth of Lewis' fascination with music from the 1970s. But where Under The Black Light transported the listener to a disco on the Sunset Strip, Acid Tongue puts its audience on shag carpeting in a wood-paneled living room to watch the first broadcast of Austin City Limits.

The manic-pixie-dream Jenny Lewis that lived in the fantasies of thousands of her lonely male fans' heads has left the building, and she's probably never coming back (I weep as I write). She simply sounds too good and too comfortable singing songs that would fit on any album-oriented radio station. But don't get too upset, all you men out there - she still wants to be your friend. It's just that she doesn't want to limit her opportunities right now, you see? This may not make you feel any better, but her ability to inhabit so many sounds, across not only the current Acid Tongue but all the way back to Rilo Kiley's More Adventurous, should make you wonder just how long you've been missing the writing on the wall.

Starting with album opener ‘Black Sand’, Lewis seems to be cleansing her palette to prepare for the beer-soaked, BBQ-stained roadhouses, the backwoods bayou shacks, the tent revivals, and the crypto-segregated lunch counters she plans to visit over the next 47 minutes. The spare and almost atonal ‘Black Sand’ can initially seem shockingly inaccessible. Structurally, the most prominent repeated musical phrase comes from Lewis telling the listener that all the scenes described in the song occurred "on the black sand". This repetition helps the listener attain a foothold, but Lewis' increasingly virtuoso performances of the line as the song progresses seems geared toward displaying the upper limits of her singing abilities.

The second track ‘Pretty Bird’ exalts in a slinky mood whose presence was hinted at on Under The Blacklight. The subsequent track, ‘The Next Messiah’, also comes out swinging. It's an endless boogie through a dank, Louisiana swamp. The chugging music, the seedy story of a man and his cocktail-waitress girlfriend who become outlaws, and the southern gothic spirituality almost propel the song into bayou-sploitation territory, however, Lewis manages to keep fresh what could have become a flat, tasteless imitation, and turned in possibly the best song on the album.

She finds similar success on two back-to-back tracks late on the album, ‘Tryin' My Best’ and ‘Jack Killed Mom’. Midway through the former, I forgot I was not listening to Aretha Franklin's greatest hits. Things only got more confusing with the latter track since it seems designed to directly evoke Franklin's version of ‘The House That Jack Built’, distinguished only by the Oedipal and matricidal personality of Lewis' Jack.

The other tracks on the album do not prove to be as striking as these examples. However, they all solidly entertain and even ‘See Fernando’ is interesting in its own right, despite introducing a musical style noticeably different from the rest of the album.

Acid Tongue continues the zag which began with Rilo Kiley's Under The Black Light and it defiantly frustrates the expectations of indie rockers and folk aficionados who hoped for a corrective zig that would take Jenny Lewis back towards her earlier, less refined sound. However, for those willing to jettison overblown concerns with authenticity and indie cred and for those blessedly not afflicted with such maladies, Acid Tongue represents an intriguing example of an artist continuing to break new stylistic ground while simultaneously providing a genuinely enjoyable listening experience