Photo credit: Justin Harris
Slow Walker
Like a lot of bands formed by high school friends, Slow Walker began with decidedly modest ambitions—jam together, play some shows, maybe get around to an album. That’s about it. In their early years the band made no qualms about the fact they were mostly just fucking around. Lest anybody take the pummeling stoner rock of their 2011 debut Good For Business too seriously, they doused it with quirky surf-rock guitars, slacker vocals and lots of in-jokes
By 2014’s Shane Hochstetler-produced self-titled LP, however, the band’s smirk wasn’t nearly so wide. Pushing the band’s heaving, lacerating riffs front and center, it was the work of a group that had picked up some chops and was ready to show them off, but even that record feels like a test run for the group’s latest, Robert Plantain’s Grunge Lords, the album where it all comes together. Recording once again with Hochstetler, the quartet tears through these nine snarling songs with punk-ish brevity. Even the seven-minute “Dead Man Walking,” the most purebred stoner jam on a record that frequently detours into grunge and psych-pop, is so full-throttle it roars by in a blaze.
As massive as the record is, it achieves its heft without studio trickery. Much of it was tracked without overdubs. Many songs feel like they could have been recorded in a basement practice space; close your eyes and you can almost smell water-stained wood paneling and crates of musky old Zeppelin records. And while Grunge Lords is a good deal muddier than the typical Hochstetler-produced Milwaukee rock record—the producer usually favors crisp, clean sounds, but here the instruments bleed together—it all feels deliberate. There’s a vision here.
“We recorded our last LP with Shane, too, but with that album we didn’t have as clear of an understanding of the recording process, or as clear of an idea of what we wanted the record to sound like, but with this one we knew going in,” singer/guitarist Justin Harris says. “On a song-by-song basis we had a better sense of what we were going for, but overall we wanted to capture more of a live feel, and not get too fancy with it. We wanted to have a good base of live takes for all the songs.”
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Slow Walker have never been one of the city’s more popular bands. They’ve spent most of the last six or so years near the bottom of local bills, playing one modestly promoted show after another, usually for audiences there to see other bands. Grunge Lords should be the album that changes that—the album that announces Slow Walker as a destination band in their own right and cements them as one of the city’s marquee underground rock acts.
But it probably won’t be. It’s not even clear, really, whether Slow Walker even want it to be. Over the year’s they’ve evolved from essentially a joke band into a seriously excellent, no-nonsense rock band, but they still think of themselves as a bunch of friends goofing around.
“We’re all really close friends, so we don’t really have any real goals of trying to do anything with this band other than trying to make music or put it out ourselves,” Harris says. “I mean, we would love to play shows to packed rooms all the time, but I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like we don’t get asked to play bigger shows.”
That’s probably in no small part because the group doesn’t seek out big shows. “A lot of bands will have one guy who handles the booking or the promotion, but for us it’s always been kind of random,” Harris says. “One of us will book a show, then another will. We don’t have a clear cut leader.”
So there probably won’t be too much promotion behind Grunge Lords, which they released on cassette last week on Stale Heat Records, along with a bonus tape of older demos. Harris says they’ll probably follow up last weekend’s release show at Circle-A Café with a few shows around the Midwest, and that’ll be about it.
“Realistically we can’t take off work to coordinate our schedules and to even take a regional tour,” he says. “But we usually keep it low key, and we’re OK with that.”
Robert Plantain’s Grunge Lords is available at slowwalker.bandcamp.com. You can stream it below.
