Jerry Lee Lewis' name is constantly used in comparison to Jason D. Williams, both by the media and by Williams himself; but in fact, the similarities between the two are pretty superficial. They're both old-school rock & roll piano pounders whose music bears a slightly unhinged edge, and that's pretty much it. Beyond that, Williams is his own man and then some. In fact, Killer Instincts makes it abundantly clear that he's one of those classic American characters who fall solidly into the nonpareil category. These tracks may not be quite off the wall enough to qualify for full-fledged "outsider music" status, but they come pretty damn close. If anything keeps them from crossing that line it's Williams' own natural musicality; he can plunk those ivories with a blend of boogie-woogie, R&B, barroom blues, and country that's pure Americana, and while his singing style may be a bit on the rough-and-ready side, it's overflowing with affable personality. Killer Instincts was produced by Williams' fan and roots rock troubadour Todd Snider, and while the pair had initially planned for the album to contain a fair amount of cover material, things wound up taking a different turn. Such was the freewheeling, improvisatory spirit flowing between these two iconoclasts that they ended up putting together new tunes right there in the studio, in between Williams pulling out and polishing up half-remembered items from his own songbag. Of course, Williams' eccentric, left-field perspective insured that those tunes would make for a weird, wild ride. "If You Ever Saw a Baby with Its Pud," for instance, was apparently a spontaneously composed piece, and its off-kilter, almost stream of consciousness lyrical direction backs that up. "Like Jerry Lee" details the ups and downs of being the Killer's crazy musical cousin, and "White Trash Wife" pulls up its sleeves and digs deeply and graphically into the seamy underbelly of American culture, as its title suggests. By the time you get to the end of Killer Instincts, you feel as though you've just spent an hour at a bar buying drinks for a charmingly odd barfly whose tall tales get simultaneously stranger and more entertaining as you both increase your blood alcohol content.