R.B. Reed
Outsider Ballads
Beep Repaired Records

“Today’s sweet embrace is tomorrow’s strangle hold.” —R.B. Reed

R.B. Reed’s Outsider Ballads is the perfect soundtrack to the 1955 film The Night of the Hunter: stark, creepy, beautiful, and existential.

Reed is a singer/songwriter, but don’t misinterpret him as some neo-hippie in a coffee shop whose rants are backed by three chords and the truth.

Instead, we hear a rich baritone crooning about murder and love. In other words, the songs on this album reveal an attractive voice singing about ugly topics.

Outsider Ballads was recorded in a day, with Beep Repaired founding father Olie Eshleman at the helm, twiddling the knobs and adjusting the microphones. The CD sounds very personal and live. It’s like sitting in someone’s attic and listening to your favorite record. There’s a warmth and intimacy that usually gets lost on record.

The strongest cut is “Not Your Average John.” Taken from the pages of true crime, it relays the double life of a door-to-door salesman who kills prostitutes in his off time. Reed’s vocals go from murmur to wail, climaxing just before he sings about the final killing. “Left hand wears a wedding band/But the right holds a kitchen knife/He’s going to steal your life from you.” The killer’s final victim is his own suspecting wife. As far as murder ballads go, “Average John” is just as terrifying as the traditional “Stagger Lee.”

In fact, some of these lyrics scare the bejeezus outta me; others are more humorous and clever. Take the final track, “Black,” on which R. B. compares all the types of people who wear black clothing: rock and roll legends, Satanists, FBI agents, goth kids, and Dungeons and Dragons gamers are equal fodder. In one example, the description of goth music as “the soundtrack to the mating dance of vampire bats” makes me howl. And in the case of the D&D gamers, Reed bemoans that his favorite color is ruined by these trench-coat-wearing, 20-sided-die-rolling nerds.

Through his humor, Reed makes the darker, morose lyrics more palpable and, in some cases, more poignant. In “Taxidermied Love,” the imagery of the singer being stuffed with treated cotton and kept by his ex-lover is both macabre and absurd. These lyrics tell the whole story: “I could have been your only pet/If I survived the vivisect/For me at least you chose the most flattering pose/To seal our taxidermied love.”

This is an intelligent record, one on which R.B. Reed executes gloomy lyrics with entertaining rhymes and imagery. And this juxtaposition hits the listener like a dry whiskey in a broken glass, in the parlance of Philip Marlowe. Outsider Ballads bridges the gap between the pulp fiction of Raymond Chandler and the acoustic goth of Leonard Cohen. - (8.5/10)

R.B Reed plays the Rendezvous in Seattle on September 7, treks down to Portland for a show at Valentines on September 9, and then returns home for a show at the Mars Bar on September 20.

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