Music Review: Red Eye Ruby, ‘The Ruby EP’
The new EP from this genre-defying Minnesota act traverses the excitement and pain inherent in the search for love and pleasure.
Red Eye Ruby The Ruby EP artwork, 2022.
Minneapolis band Red Eye Ruby has never been a single-genre act. The group—which has morphed from a mostly-string trio that included a cello(!) to a full band with drums and bass—has always brought in elements of folk, jazz and other roots music. When I first saw them in 2019, they had a hard, almost punk edge to their sound, but also lilting melodies and rhythms that sounded like something between cabaret and circus music.
Wherever their sound takes them, you’ll never mistake a Red Eye Ruby song as being by any other band. That’s wholly down to the vocals of bandleader Liz Collin (who also performs solo as Ruby Blu). Otherworldly yet earthy, her voice wraps around syllables with silky smoothness, then stops abruptly to step up and down notes on vocal riffs. Sometimes breathy and ethereal, sometimes throaty with a crackle of vocal fry, it eludes description as adeptly as her band’s sound dances between genres.
On the band’s new record, The Ruby EP, their sound has softened again, moving away from punk and toward a 60s-70s pop-rock sensibility with hints of funk and R&B. (There’s still a flavor of that carnival/burlesque feel to it, thank goodness.)
It opens with the breezy midtempo “Sunshine and Good Looking,” which features bright horns and keyboards. I guarantee if you just bliss out to it, you’ll think it’s a sweet summer love song. But despite its sunny title and easygoing pace, the lyrics tell a story of a relationship that went very wrong, leaving both parties damaged: “It’s hard to say just how broken we are and how much we’ve hurt each other.” Only at the end is there a glimmer of resilience and optimism that matches the upbeat instrumentation: “Let’s move through the past, we’re better for it / just move through the pain, we’re better for it.”
Liz Collin of Red Eye Ruby. Photo credit: Ian Gibbs.
The next song, “Bright,” opens with a distant-sounding chorus and echoey banjo plucked in a minor key, setting a haunted tone that syncs up with the lyrics about being unlucky in love, drawn in and then left “high and dry” by lovers who aren’t what they seem, stacking up similar experiences and memories with no end in sight: “All these men I’ve loved live in my soul / long after I let them go / And I will try to run but I can’t hide / ’cause I bought the ticket; take the ride.”
“Howl” is a familiar song; it appeared on Red Eye Ruby’s self-titled 2017 album in a hot jazz style, and I’ve heard it played live with more of a hard-rock feel, but here the bouncy rhythm is set by simple guitar fingerpicking, eventually joined by growing layers of instruments until it’s got a lush, full sound.
The lyrics take us through a surreal, dreamlike day from morning to midnight, through adventures that are by turns scary (“I shiver in the shadows / I find myself in places I’m not supposed to be”), ecstatic (“Light flickers through the trees / There's happy creatures everywhere / Just doing what they please”) and romantic (“I will wander now to find my love, his eyes are molten gold / While dreaming of his sweet caress my mind is close to home”). The track ends with actual howling, followed by a loose, jazzy outro that recalls the earliest version of the song.
The next song kicks into a higher gear and quite a different sound than anything before (or after) it. “Burning Sunbeams” is an ode to ephemeral love (“Your love is like a sunbeam, baby, warm and bright / but sunbeams never last, they fade into the night”) but, buoyed by a driving beat and a sound somewhere between Southern and alt rock, it conveys the excitement rather than the frustration of chasing that elusive spark.
Red Eye Ruby. Photo credit: Ian Gibbs.
“Sin Again” takes the tempo down but turns the temperature up. The lyrics tell of boozy nights and bad behavior (“As soon as that bartender filled up my cup, I should’ve known where your hands would end up / Straight whiskey on ice makes my body feel good, but it makes me do things that I never should”) while sultry, snarling electric guitar (courtesy of young Midwest virtuoso Dylan Salfer) paints the picture in even more lurid colors.
Taking sensuality to a sweeter, more natural place, “Mockingbird” is a lovely, simple lullaby, Collin’s voice accompanied only by gentle arpeggios on an electric guitar. It’s a similar story to “Sin Again” that somehow feels more wholesome and romantic when told in this soft, lilting soundscape: “The Union Pacific goes rolling, pine needles in my hair / Lay me down my darling, you have me anywhere.”
The relative peace of that song makes “The Phone Call” even more discordant. Against dissonant moaning strings, the 41-second track takes the form of a conversation between Collin and an admirer who quickly becomes unpleasant as he presses on with his unwelcome attention.
The strings segue into the final song of the EP, “My Name Is Ruby,” which smartly pulls together all the lust and pain of the preceding tracks into a brash manifesto (“I have a voice, I’m someone, let me speak”). It’s an expression of the conflicting position many women are in, trying to find love and exercise their sexual freedom while fending off abuse and disrespect. “My body’s no commodity,” declares this “deep and joyful soul,” while also expressing conflicted attraction to someone who doesn’t get it: “Your love’s a chokehold and a hug” is shortly followed by “hike up my skirt and grab my hips / I wouldn’t have it any other way.” It’s a complicated state of being that many listeners can no doubt identify with.
Red Eye Ruby. Photo credit: Chelsea Oxborough.
For longtime fans of Red Eye Ruby, this EP explores themes of love and sex and resilience that we’ve come to expect of the band, while venturing into new frontiers musically. For new listeners, it’s an enticing introduction to this one-of-a-kind act that the Twin Cities are lucky to have as part of our music scene.
Carol Roth. Photo credit: Dan Lee.
Carol Roth is a full-time marketing copywriter and the primary music journalist and social media publicist for Adventures in Americana. In addition to studying the guitar and songwriting, Carol’s additional creative side hustle is writing self-proclaimed “trashy” novels under the pseudonym T.A. Berkeley!
