Lonnie Walker just returned from taking their country-punk roots rock on a month long tour with Future Islands, to promote a split 7” the two bands released on November 4, 2010. Titled The Ink Well/Love Turn, the release is limited to 1000 pieces of peach vinyl via Baltimore’s Friends Records.
Originally a one-man band, Lonnie Walker evolved from the solo spirit of Brian Corum into a collection of friends bound by shared passion for music and visual art. After years of honing their sound at house shows and DIY spaces in Greenville, NC, and a move to Raleigh, Lonnie Walker garnered local support immediately. Through the additions of Eric Hill, Justin Flythe, Raymond Finn, and Josh Bridgers, Lonnie Walker’s music has evolved into their own blend of rootsy Americana and dance-party punk-rock steadily gaining momentum outside their home state.
“Lonnie Walker frontman Brian Corum’s lyrics are a tangled torrent of stream-of-consciousness observations whose opacity defies easy translation. But, to borrow a title from one of the band’s intriguing blends of guitar-centric roots and indie fare, it somehow “Feels Like Right,” and what began as a solo vehicle has morphed into a great Raleigh-based quintet renowned for the kind of joyfully sloppy throw-downs critical to any festival experience.
Corum can take a twangy life-on-the-road trope like the one underpinning “Compass Comforts”—from his band’s sparkling 2009 debut These Times Old Times—and chronicle the emotional toll without losing sight of the youthful elan that so many roots rockers exclude just to make their added-gravitas point. The band drives the thrumming beat into a twitchy, “what town is this again?” shuffle while Corum delivers an adenoidal, near-rap litany of city names and images that make up an “Americana panorama” fresh with new ideas. A similar restlessness pervades most of their songs, turning a slow love-sick blues like “Back Home Inside With You” into a sputtering garage howler, and imbuing the folkie lament “Ships” with a plank-walking marching beat, as if the Decemberists had been born a bar band. All that nervous energy comes together in album-centerpiece “Summertime,” whose double-time cascade of words and music features Corum’s oddball ruminations on personal hygiene and ’80s nostalgia, and a bridge of shout-out-loud, Neutral Milk Hotel urgency.
This is what makes Lonnie Walker more memorable than their by-the-numbers roots peers—an enthusiastic compulsion to blend eras and blur edges both musical and lyrical. Theirs is an exuberance that doesn’t sacrifice levity for depth, either. Like the band’s take on the traditional music at its core, looking back is a springboard forward, as “Summertime” suggests: “Though it is no longer the ’80s, you know I wish I could go back/ Back to being born again and have a second chance at life/ And then I would dothe exact same thing because I like to do things twice.” —John Schacht
“Back Home Inside With You” video via The Daily Tarheel
Lonnie Walker Daytrotter session available now!
This four song session offers live versions of Compass Comforts, Grape Juice, Love Turn, and a new song not previously recorded, Teenage Poem.
“The way that the song “Teenage Poem” moves us is special. It’s that simple. It’s a standout, plain and easy. It’s in one of those rare ways, getting to us with words, with subtle melodies, with a coming of age story, with groove that feels like a southern California skyline during high tide, when the first glass of wine is starting to settle in, with a penetrating guitar stroke…” – Sean Moeller, Daytrotter
Artist: Lonnie Walker
Album: These Times Old Times
Label: DiggUp Tapes
Release Date: December 14, 2010
01. Grape Juice
02. Compass Comforts
03. Old Birds In The Seas
04. Back Home Inside With You
05. Wider Than White
06. Horse Boots
07. St. Sleeper
08. Summertime
09. Ships
10. Pendulum’s Chest
11. Country Crowded Trees
12. Crochet