here’s something quietly gutsy about dragging your old demos out into the daylight and saying, “Yeah, this was me. Take it or fuck off.” The Unreasonables isn’t a nostalgia cash-grab or a glossy archive job; it’s a box of half-rusted tools from the late ’70s and early ’80s, still sharp enough to draw blood if you grab them wrong. Rusty Reid’s long-buried Houston project finally seeing sense-checking daylight feels less like a lost classic and more like a forensic examination of a restless mind that never quite sat still long enough to become fashionable.
Straight out the gate, Hot as a Pistol and Hurricane come swinging with wiry guitar lines and that clipped, almost impatient rock urgency that screams “band with something to prove and no patience for polish.” There’s grit here, real grit, the kind you can’t fake with plug-ins or tape hiss presets. Crossfire and Coldhearted lean into a tougher, bar-room rock feel, all elbows and side-eye, while Impatient does exactly what it says on the tin – pacing back and forth, itching to explode, occasionally tripping over its own momentum in a way that feels more human than sloppy.
As the record rolls on through You’re Not the One and Shock Me, you start to hear the real strength of these recordings: personality bleeding through technical limitation. The guitars are everywhere because they had to be, not because it was a trend, and the result is a thick, occasionally cluttered sound that still manages to feel alive. Excuses and Enough Is Enough hit a more cynical stride, the songwriting tightening up even if the recordings themselves remain defiantly rough around the edges. That’s where this collection starts to earn its keep.
By the time Piece of the Action and Calcasieu Sue roll in, the band sounds more comfortable occupying its own weird lane, not quite punk, not quite classic rock, not slick enough for MTV but too sharp to be dismissed as pub-rock filler. Only Right Girl and Me and You flirt with melodic clarity, and you can almost hear the version of this band that might’ve existed with better funding and a bit more luck. Try to Do That to Me and Attitude Change bristle with attitude but occasionally suffer from overcrowding – too many ideas fighting for the same slice of sonic real estate.
That restlessness becomes both the album’s charm and its biggest flaw. Let’s Just Talk and How Much More feel like sketches for songs that deserved another pass, while Edge of the End hints at something more expansive that never quite gets the space it needs. Closing track The Way She Does Me wraps things up with a shrug rather than a bang, but maybe that’s the point – these were never meant to be definitive statements.
What The Unreasonables does brilliantly is document a band in motion, not a finished product. The downside is that some listeners will wish Rusty had curated harder or trimmed the fat. Nineteen tracks of demos is a big ask, and a tighter selection might’ve landed harder. Still, there’s an honesty here that modern “lost album” releases often lack. This isn’t myth-making; it’s self-interrogation. Flawed, raw, occasionally frustrating – and all the better for it.
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