Stream: Ike Reilly, ‘Bolt Cutter’

Kevin Bronson on April 28th, 2017

0

Ike Reilly, the Pride of Libertyville, Ill., has long been underrated by everybody except his cult following and the Other Pride of Libertyville, Ill., Tom Morello.** Reilly’s working-class rock ’n’ roll and upper-crust lyricism (Reilly’s name should be mentioned on any list of American rock “poets”) has dazzled on seventh full-lengths, three as the Ike Reilly Assassination and four under his own name. (The first, 2001’s brilliant “Salesmen and Racists” lives on in major-label ignominy.) Morello himself has likened his boyhood pal to a cross between Springsteen and the Replacements, although we might add a little Clash. Reilly’s latest full-length, “Born on Fire,” was released in 2015 on Morello’s Firebrand label, the same imprint that today released the new Reilly single “Bolt Cutter.” Here, Reilly, a storyteller nonpareil whose past work has taken aim at injustice and hypcrisy in all forms, has 45 in his cross-hairs, specifically the president’s ill-conceived (and, as it turns out, ill-fated) travel ban. He spins the tale of a man going to the airport to picked up his wife and daughter only to find them detained — and in shackles. The man solicits the help of a radio DJ, who arrives with a pair of bolt cutters. “‘Bolt Cutter’ is about breaking somebody free,” Reilly told Rolling Stone, where the song premiered. “It’s about not taking any shit and taking back what has been taken or stolen from you … your voice, your rights, your family, your dreams.”

** OK, so Marlon Brando, Tool’s Adam Jones and former Illinois Gov./U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson hail from Libertyville too, but for the sake of this item …

||| Stream: “Bolt Cutter”