FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 9, 2018
Ike Reilly plans Chicago and Minneapolis
residencies in May to kick off
the release of Crooked Love
Chicago, IL-based indie rock singer-songwriter Ike Reilly is set to release his seventh studio album, Crooked Love, on CD and digital formats on May 18, 2018 via Rock Ridge Music. (A vinyl version will be released later this year.) To kick off the album release, Reilly is planning dual solo residencies in Chicago (at Old Town School of Folk Music) and Minneapolis (at Icehouse) in May. The show dates are as follows:
May 2nd – Icehouse, Minneapolis, MN (w/Laska) – tickets
May 9th – Icehouse, Minneapolis, MN (w/Mary Bue) – tickets
May 10th – Old Town School of Folk Music, Chicago, IL (w/Michael McDermott) – tickets
May 16th – Icehouse, Minneapolis, MN (w/Hannah Vonderhoff) – tickets
May 17th – Old Town School of Folk Music, Chicago, IL (w/Gia Margaret) – tickets
May 23rd – Icehouse, Minneapolis, MN (w/Natalie Lovejoy) – tickets
May 24th – Old Town School of Folk Music (w/Half Gringa [solo]) – tickets
May 31st – Old Town School of Folk Music (w/actor-comedian David Pasquesi) – tickets
Tickets go on sale today for the shows. Ticket links are included above beside each date.
Reilly has already been testing the songs from the new album live with band shows in March in the Midwest. An album preview show in his hometown of Libertyville, IL is scheduled to take place on April 14th at Diamond City Studio (tickets: https://crookedlove.brownpapertickets.com/). More dates in additional markets will be announced soon.
The New York Times has praised Reilly’s live show in the past: “Ike Reilly is a kind of natural resource, mined from the bedrock of music. All the values that make rock important to people—storytelling, melody, rage, laughter—are part and parcel of every Ike Reilly show I have ever seen. One of the best touring acts in the country, Reilly’s band takes it as a personal challenge to upend and amaze every room they play in.”
Since his major label debut, the groundbreaking Salesmen and Racists, Reilly has been making punk/folk/blues influenced rock ’n’ roll records that lean heavily on stories of outsiders with keen details and broad strokes that insinuate a crack in the American dream. Reilly’s band, The Assassination, has been called one of the best live bands in America, and the body of recorded work they’ve turned out has been poetic, rebellious, wholly original, and critically acclaimed.
For Crooked Love, joining Reilly (vocals, guitar, harp) and Phil Karnats (guitar) in the studio were Peter Cimbalo (bass, percussion), Dave Cottini (drums, percussion, vocals), and Adam Krier (guitar, keyboards, vocals), and the album shows how Reilly has landed himself squarely in the raw, emotional zeitgeist of the times. This collection of succinct, tight-but-loose songs reflects the continuing evolution of Reilly’s ever-visceral wordsmithing, as married with a Murderer’s Row of backing tracks forged out of the intuitive interplay of his longstanding Assassination bandmates, not to mention the input of a few special guests, too, including guitarist Tommy O’Donnell, pianist Ed Tinley, and saxophonists Mars Williams and Bill Overton, as well as family legacies Mickey Reilly on vocals and Peter John Cimbalo on drums. The album was co-produced by Reilly and Karnats.
Press praise for Reilly’s music has been extensive over the years. Chicago Magazine praised Reilly’s “outlandish storytelling, underdog combativeness, and slapstick humor.” Minneapolis City Pages said, “Equal parts punk rocker, poet, and blue-collar barfly, Reilly’s stories are as bizarre and filthy and honest and pure as the people who come out to his shows. His songs reach out and grab people, shake them by the collars, make them jump up and down.” Chicago Tribune admired that Ike “merges his affinity for folk-punk narrative and anthemic guitar chords with hip-hop’s vocal cadences and rhythmic drive.” PopMatters.com called him “the best songwriter in America… Hilarious, unsettling, raw… but mostly just rocking.” USA Today hailed Reilly as “never less than original… ferociously intelligent… always worth listening to.” And Los Angeles Times described Reilly’s music as “…barroom rock narrated by a wiseguy who’s as comfortable regaling PhDs and poets as he is pimps and porn stars.”