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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Walker Kong: Country living
Wednesday 28 March @ 15:07:36 |
  by NATHAN DEAN
Jeremy Ackerman is Bob Dylan in reverse. Whereas Hibbing's now-famous folkie began his musical journey with the far more typical trek from small town life up north to apartment dwelling in the city of Minneapolis, Ackerman, already a well-established indie-pop musician here in the Cities, decided to pick up stakes and head for the country two and a half years ago.
"It definitely runs counter to what I should be doing as far as pursuing music," admits Ackerman of his move to the small town of Ashland, Wisc., three and a half hours north of Minneapolis. "My wife, Alex, and I had sort of fancied living the country life for about a decade so we decided to give it a shot. We have a son and I'm working as an art teacher."
For most musicians, a move to the country--coupled with a steady job and familial responsibilities--would signal the death knell of their pop music ambitions. Fortunately, Ackerman isn't most musicians, as evidenced by the strength of the newly released Deliver Us from People, his group Walker Kong's fourth proper full-length album and first since his move northward.
Continuing in the sparkling anglophile pop traditions of its predecessors, Deliver Us from People is another collection of buoyant melodies and jangling guitars fronted by the decidedly Brit-sounding bite of Ackerman's tenor and lead guitarist Tony Mogelson's Johnny-Marr-ish guitar contortions. Throughout the album, the sextet (which also includes percussionist Kevin Riach, bassist Peter Robelia, drummer Emily Cahill and Ackerman's wife on backing vocals) manages to perfectly balance brash rock gestures with suave sophistication.
"With this record we tried to orchestrate it less and capture more of the true live energy of the band," says Ackerman. "That's something we thought was maybe compromised a bit on the previous recording. [Walker Kong's 2004 album, Transparent Life,] was concerned more with ambient sounds and incidental mood soundtrack-type stuff. For this record we had been playing a bunch of more upbeat pop songs and I really wanted to capture that. I even tried to amp my voice up a little more and go for sort of an Elvis Costello-type thing, although it never sounds like that."
 True to Ackerman's word, Deliver Us from People isn't quite as lavishly produced as Transparent Life, but sweeping arrangements pop up with enough frequency (as on the string-heavy stunner "We Are the Falling Stars") to make it clear that a good deal of care was still put into the recording process. Whether it's the bed of warm keyboard sounds and spot-on harmonies that anchor the gentle ballad "The Waiting Room," or the artfully-applied shaker underpinning Mogelson's echo-laden mini-solo at the close of "Belmont, 1973," every sound feels carefully labored over, but this time it's the product of a living, breathing band, rather than extensive overdubbing.
"I think we've always wanted to make a record in a week and we just keep failing," admits Ackerman of the typically long gestation period for each Walker Kong album (recording on Deliver Us from People began in March of 2005 and mastering wasn't completed until December of 2006). "That's always been the goal, but somehow it turns into a couple of years and there's no way of explaining how that happens. We recorded all of the basic tracks in like three days at Creative Electric Studio. This one's quicker and faster and a little bit more biting I think because of that. The rest of the record-making process really stretched out, though, because of having kids and moving up north--just different life situations. Because we're not a band that plays a ton of gigs, it's probably a good thing we take so long working on the records because I think each time we sort of figure out our sound again and then try and come to a complete understanding of it, so that takes awhile."
Ackerman's strange lyrical worlds would seemingly also take awhile to construct since, as on the previous few albums, Ackerman decided to work around a loose conceptual theme when writing the words for Deliver Us from People. This time it was about the subjugation of animals at the hands of the human race (um, yeah, not exactly your typical break-up album). As with previous WK albums, however, the theme isn't over the top, but rather embedded in a set of artfully abstract and evocative lyrics that only occasionally makes use of explicit animal imagery ("Staring out the window into suburban skies / The cat is in the kitchen with terror in his eyes").
"The reason I usually work within the constructs of more specific themes is so that lyrically the songs have a more set path of ideas," says Ackerman. "I think I might have used the word love on this record somewhere--it might be used once on one song--but I've always shied away from that kind of language. I like songwriters that bend things to be a little bit darker and edgier, who are more focused on metaphor and less on obvious sorts of lyrical pop hooks. I think that's sort of what I do. I really enjoy the more poetic aspects of lyric writing although I don't consider it poetry. You look at how bubble gum pop artists can create lyrics that already exist by re-mashing them and I want to delve a little bit deeper into whatever it is that I think a song wants."
As Ackerman and his longtime bandmates move into their second decade together, they appear set to continue digging and discovering new riches in their treasure trove of sophisti-pop maneuvers, which is damn good news for those Twin Cities music fans who worried Walker Kong would go the way of the dinosaur after Ackerman's move.
"I spent too much of the early era of the band being concerned about the status of the group and whether people thought we were cool," says a reflective Ackerman as our conversation comes to close. "Now that I'm in my 30s, I really understand the band as a vehicle for something deeper and more interesting than some superficial kind of scenester situation. Now it's more about the music and the space around it and the relationships I have with the people in the band. There is no music scene in Ashland and none of that sort of community here, so I still feel like a Minneapolis musician. Being up here makes the moments when the band is active together even more exciting. Whenever I come down and we practice it's sort of an event and we have a lot of fun. I think we've gotten better because of it." ||
Walker Kong plays the CD release show for Deliver Us from People on Sat., March 31 at the Turf Club with opening acts Estate and Vicious Vicious. 9 p.m. $5. 21+. Corner of University and Snelling Aves., St. Paul. 651-647-0486. For more information on Walker Kong, check out their official website at walkerkong.com.
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