http://www.ikereilly.com/

Ike Reilly's your average guy. OK, so he's your average hard-ass, rough-talking, surprisingly intuitive while simultaneously straight-forward guy. He's an inside outsider.

Just the title is going to bring you in to this record: Salesmen and Racists is the debut album from tough guy Ike Reilly who spent most of his time trying to be the guy someone wrote songs about instead of being the guy who worte the songs. Whoops, a little Barry Manilowy there...you get the idea.

He knew he had some talent, was playing in pick-up bands and then decided to take things a little farther and constructed a studio so he could record some of the stuff he was messing around with. A newcomer only to the general public, Reilly has played in various bands over the past decade-plus, including stints with Celtic rockers The Drovers and his early folk-punk band The Eisenhowers. He's also held down a wide variety of jobs that has included doorman at a Hyatt hotel and working in a cemetery. Overnight success his ass.

The first single, "Commie Drives A Nova," is thrashy-silly. To have cocktail weinies and communism in the same song seems like a bit of a stretch. But it's presented in such a logical way. Harsh like the Dead Milkmen, but with more sense. And "Hip Hop Thighs #17" is more country than anything else. Although, to quote Ike, "I think of it as a really unclean kind of song. I think we deliberately tried to steer clear of anything that could be reminiscent of that rootsy shit. That bores the shit out of me." Each song has it's own identity but they're obviously all Ike.

-the profiler