ACL Review: Walker Lukens & the Side Arms

Electro doo-wop? The prospect of just such a new millennial subgenre blips, bubbles, and bounces in the hands of Walker Lukens & the Side Arms. One of Saturday’s out-of-the-gate acts, on the grandly midsize (for ACL) Miller Lite stage, the local quintet played pied piper to a homegrown fan base, out in force despite the noontime solar fry.

Lukens stood centerstage at an electric double keyboard setup, flanked by a second keyboardist immediately to his right, and bass, guitar, and drums to his left and behind him. All together, they pulsed out deep, glistening pools of pop, the wide open spaces between beat and band-leading basslines setting up proto-Motown chorus hooks and even audience claps. At times, the sound panned precipitously from the left channel to the right like (Jefferson) airplane psychedelia. The frontman, easily mistaken for a louche Rivers Cuomo, began seeping out through his blue supper jacket.

“I try to keep the tuxedo on the whole time,” he admitted, “but it’s really hot.”

The close of one undulation – Lukens counts EP Year of the Dog, 2013 LP Devoted, and next Friday’s Never Understood, recorded locally with Spoon’s Jim Eno and released by Modern Outsider – found the band’s namesake exchanging exclamatory yowls with the suddenly not-so-superfluous second keyboardist like Meat Loaf and Ellen Foley braying “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” Next, a trip-hop throb beat down slow and trickling, as hot and moist as the sweat waterfalling down the assemblage’s sides and backs.

In the middle of the gathering, two young women stood hypnotized, their metronomic hip movements rocking pendulum-like to the sex beat of Walker Lukens & the Side Arms.