In paradise

Marion Walker is the catchall name that artist/musician/dancers Jessie Marion Smith and Kyle Walker Akins use for all their creative collaborations. When last we checked in with them, they were curating a festival and workshop on dance films for the Holland Project, the all-ages arts organization (“Moving pictures,” Musicbeat, June 13, 2013).

Since then, they’ve shifted their focus toward writing songs and performing music. They’ve recruited a crackerjack rhythm section, drummer Donovan Williams and bassist Clark Demeritt, two of the busier players in the Reno rock scene. With that lineup solidified, Akins says, Marion Walker is now a “real band.” Smith and Walker both sing and play guitar, although Smith often switches to keyboards.

Akins, somewhat facetiously, describes the band’s sound as “a volcano in an ice storm.” It’s fuzzed-out psych rock, with lovely, twinned male-and-female vocals buried in reverb and noise over country-like chord progressions.

Demeritt jokingly described the band’s sound as Sonic Youth playing the Jimmy Buffett song “Cheeseburger in Paradise.” In other words, it sounds a lot like Neil Young & Crazy Horse.

With delicious, intentional irony, one of the band’s newest songs is an epic, three-part suite about not taking yourself too seriously. It’s musically ambitious while it lyrically skewers self-importance. It’s called “Serious Picnic,” and although the band members say that’s just a working title, now it’s in print, so they’re stuck with it.

“I like to describe the music as a subway yank,” said Akins. You’re standing on a subway platform, and you’re a little too close to the edge, checking out the train, and someone yanks you behind the collar to save your life. There are moments in music like that.”

Because Akins and Smith have backgrounds in other creative disciplines—art and dance—they do things commonly done in those fields but often overlooked by musicians—like applying for grants and residencies.

They wrote and recorded many of their songs during an artists’ residency in Seattle, and procured a grant from New Music USA to produce a video for their song, “We Won’t be in Love Much Longer.” They made the video in Florida in a foggy, Spanish moss-rich forest at night. The artists appear in spectral dance motion and burn a wooden piano to the ground. The Reno video premiere is at The Loving Cup—formerly the Biggest Little City Club—on Dec. 12. It will be the group’s first show in a long time and Demeritt’s live debut with the band.

The song title “We Won’t be in Love Much Longer” sums up Akins and Smith’s cheeky perspective on romance quite well. Although the duo have been a couple for two and a half years, they see their open-ended interdisciplinary creative collaboration as far more important than their identity as romantic partners.

“I don’t like being pigeonholed as a couple band,” said Smith. “We changed the way we were writing songs, because people were always trying to book us with these cute-couple country duos. That is not what we’re about at all.”

“If you ask us what’s more important in our lives, it’s the creative pursuit more than being in love,” said Akins.