You suck. You’re a failure at relationships. Your "career" is in a state of advanced atrophy. You live in the Land of Opportunity, yet you just can’t seem to get your shit together.

The L.A. quartet's 2002 release, The Execution of All Things (Saddle Creek), is a refreshing tonic for a generation just beginning to realize how useless a liberal arts degree can be sometimes. This is how the album opens: "Let's get together and talk about the modern age. All our friends were gathered there with their pets just talking shit about how we're all so upset about the disappearing ground, as we watch it melt. "

Like other bands on the much ballyhooed, Omaha-based Saddle Creek -- indie acts like Bright Eyes and Cursive -- Rilo Kiley's songs are refreshingly literate and emotive. Talking over e-mail, label head Robb Nansel cites a "basic love for songwriting that I feel permeates through all of the bands on the label. From Cursive to Rilo Kiley to The Faint -- it all starts with a good pop song."

Singer/multi-instrumentalist Jenny Lewis approaches her lyrics from an almost novelistic bent. "Sometimes I'll just have something completely written out, or even a short story, and then I'll condense it into song format," she explains via cell phone, while en route to a gig in Portland. "I'm always focused on the story."

Their sound is more immediately bright and melodic than the oft-tortured strains of, say, Connor Oberst, Bright Eyes' frontman and the Dylan/Donnie Darko of the Saddle Creek set. The Execution of All Things revels in the band's Cali-pop roots, not just in the occasional hints of bands like The Bangles and Weezer, but also Lewis' aching purr and Blake Sennett's near-orchestral way with a guitar riff.

The group, rounded out by bassist Pierre de Reeder and drummer Jason Boesel, has invested such pop with an anxious sense of peril. When they're not swinging, the moods in their songs are crashing. Romance violently derails. Futures follow their tracks into brick walls. Joy is hard-won and you better let it course through your entire being before it up and goes again: "Crawl back into bed to dream of a time when your heart was wide open and you loved things just because, like the sick and the dying."

The peril was also apparent on their debut, Take Offs and Landings (Barsuk), but the music was more polite. Here, the arrangements are both expansive (making room for synthesizers, strings, pedal steel and whatnot) and taut (nothing down to the last drum fill sounds extraneous), strengthening the songs' seesawing emotions.

Saddle Creek's in-house producer of sorts, Mike Mogis, significantly aided in creating a bigger sound, according to Lewis. As for the sharper focus, "I think some of that was a response to Take Offs and Landings," she says. "There's some meandering stuff going on there, and we kinda allowed ourselves to jam out, which is great sometimes. But I think for this one we wanted to keep it concise."

That the band has honed their craft so finely points to their work ethic. Lewis reckons this is the third jaunt they've been on since Execution's release -- and that's not counting the tour she embarked on last spring as a member of The Postal Service, the highly praised electro-pop project spearheaded by members of Death Cab for Cutie and Dntel. "When you're an independent band that's how you get out there and meet people that listen to your music, and bring the music to the people," she says. (As if the band didn't have enough to do, they're serving as the backing band for the tour's opener, singer/songwriter M. Ward.)

Their label has provided the members of Rilo Kiley -- who can capture in song a yearning sense of displacement -- with a place to belong. Lewis says, "We feel pretty fortunate to be a part of [Saddle Creek]. The bands are incredible and we feel really proud that they accepted us, and continue to invite us to tour with them and contribute to our recordings.

Rilo Kiley plays, Fri., July 25, 7:30 p.m., $7, all ages, with M. Ward and Statistics, First Unitarian Church, 22nd and Chestnut sts., 800-594-TIXX.