Reviewing two records at once is a great way to save space. But too often there’s no reasonable justification for a writer’s choice to juxtapose two albums in one review. There’s always some brainiac comparing and contrasting, say, a new M.I.A. re-mix with the Rolling Stones’ latest offering, or some nonsense.

            But this is too easy: the frontpeople of a very popular rock band release side projects on the same day. You almost feel sorry for the publicists for both records—there’s no way they’re getting pull-quotes about one album without a mention of the other.

            The artists in question are the tiny, elfin, former child stars Blake Sennett (now with is-it-or-isn’t-it ironic mustache) and Jenny Lewis, songwriters in the Los Angeles pop band Rilo Kiley. I’m sitting here listening to the two albums on “shuffle” and what I can tell you is that you could probably pare the two down to make one OK Rilo Kiley album.

            Are Lewis and Sennett weaker than the sum of their parts? Do they need each other? In a word: probably, although Lewis’ record is more compelling for a couple of reasons.

            Sennett has done this before, and, I think, better. The first album from his band, the Elected, was recorded at Elliott Smith’s studio shortly before his death, and Sennett’s classy pop songs were fleshed out by twangy acoustic guitars and pedal steel along with the occasional choppy electro-beat, courtesy of Jimmy Tamborello. Counterintuitive, yes, but sometimes this worked amazingly well (see the unexpected, stuttering climax of “Go On”). Sun, Sun, Sun ditches the glitches and instead goes heavy on the schtick. From the cover art to the thudding snare drums, Sennett and Co. are shouting “we love the 70s" at us. The songs are pleasant enough, but lack the punchy electric guitars of Rilo Kiley to liven things up while Sennett’s moping about lost love in Southern California. He’s mostly singing about people leaving, or leaving people, and it’s sad for a time, but after a while it feels disingenuous, and by the time the band gets to “Did Me Good” and Sennett is sing-speaking an R&B “Baby, you know I love you”-style bridge, I just don’t know what to think.

            Sennett is an inventive guitarist—his riffs are always a pleasure to listen to—and he occasionally pulls out a great couplet like, “Now, I read through your poetry, yeah, every last one / Felt like I ate too much butter and drank too much rum.” The soaring slide guitars and tweeting bird sounds make moments of the record transcendent, but then again, a lot of the songs are Bright Eyes-lite whimpers about girls from San Diego.

            Lewis’ album, like Sennett’s, is a fantasy on Rilo Kiley’s twangier side: rock riffs and Lewis’ signature frowny-faced growls (remember lines like, “You could sell your baseball cards / just to pay / your / hhhRRRRRENT!”) are out, white gospel BGVs, drums played with quietly brushes, and plaintive guitar plucking are in. But while Sennett sighs about long-gone loves and lonely nights on the road, Lewis is positively intellectual—part anthropologist, part agnostic theologian. If she’s not talking about her parents’ messed-up lives, she’s making Pascal’s wager (the one that says you might as well believe in God in case there really is one) and asking, “What if God’s not there?” She name-checks Jesuits, for God’s sake. Has this ever happened in a pop song?

            Musically, Rabbit Fur Coat is a whole album of songs modeled after the Rilo Kiley number, “I Never,” in which the band finally surrendered to country music and Lewis emerged as the Grand Ol’ Opry diva she’d hinted at. She is backed up vocally by the angelic Watson Twins, whose reverby voices bolster her on lines like, “Are we killing time? / Are we killing each other?” On one ingenious occasion, they finish a sentence for her—on the vaguely hopeful “Rise Up With Fists,” Lewis sings, “Thought I saw you in Vegas / It was not pretty / but she was.” This sentence is fine the way it is, but the Watsons chime in to finish the thought with three beautiful notes, “Not your wife.” Clever moments like this make the record a dream for pop fans and grammar nerds alike.

            Lewis edges Sennett out this time, which is too bad for him, because she is already the more famous one, and not just because The Wizard was a better movie than “Boy Meets World” was a television show. Sennett has his sunny throwback vision and his broken heart, but Lewis has The Voice and that compelling tension between doubt and faith, life and death, that turns thoughtful heads at least as much as her short dresses do.