Wicked & Wild Re-Release
Ike Reilly has been around the traps for some time now. Hailing from Chicago, his solo debut ‘Salesmen and Racists’ garnered accolades back in 2001, most reviewers throwing around comparisons to Dylan and Springsteen with gay abandon. Sales apparently failed to follow however, prompting Master Reilly to change labels (another case of Screw You! Universal), fill out the band from three members to five and reinvent himself as The Ike Reilly Assassination (IRA).
This re-release of Reilly’s first two albums as the IRA is almost certainly an attempt to cash in on the subsequent success of 2007’s ‘We Belong To The Staggering Evening’. One can’t blame this whiskey-seeped purveyor of poetry for taking advantage of his accomplishments though when the music is as generally good as it is.
‘Sparkle in the Finish’ (first released 2004) combines Reilly’s relentless stream of verbiage with a magpie-style accretion of indie-rock, folk, noise(!), hip-hop and bluegrass. The album kicks off with the unbelievably catchy ‘I Don’t Want What You Got (Goin’ On)’, Reilly railing against false promises of the modern world in an unremittingly fuming rap. What follows is similarly good, highlights including the clenched fist of ‘Garbage Day’ and the hypnotically introspective ‘St. Joe’s Band’, ‘God left me peace, left me free, let me be / left me swinging in the breeze / like a coward on my knees / unpeacefully retreating’ his pinched voice wails.
‘Junkie Faithful’ starts well, opener ‘22 Hours Of Darkness’ being as instantly attractive as anything off ‘Sparkle in the Finish’. The rest however generally lacks the wicked glint of that record, Reilly’s enjoyable ramblings wrapped in some decidedly pedestrian tunes. ‘Suffer for the Trust’ is a highlight, resentfully dragging its bloodied knuckles in from the night-shift, as is the cynically self-deprecating ‘I Will Let You Down’.
Reilly’s lyrics aren’t overtly political, rather deploying a steady flow of images from the lost, lonely hinterlands of the mid-west to take wild swipes at religion, pop culture and other side effects of the capitalist juggernaut. It’s addictive stuff and with the inclusion of two previously unreleased tracks on each album (including the wonderful ‘B.I.G.O.T.’) there’s worse times than now to discover the attractions of the IRA.