Brooklyn-based alt-country sextet Oakley Hall is under fire from Nashville and the rest of the Country music industry for their non-traditional sound. Their latest album, I'll Follow You, is a gritty, honest, and above all strong rebuttal.
The band's latest full length LP - their first on Merge Records - is a bright and clear, well-written effort depicting the sound and feel of real people with real problems.
Oakley Hall is "No Depression Country," a sparse, rocky class of the genre that gets its name from the Uncle Tupelo album of the same title. The music here is complex, yet it has the feeling of the Deep South, sweet tea-sipping roots that most country fans can appreciate.
I'll Follow You starts out with skillful guitar work that moves around the scale with a speed that contrasts the reverent male vocals. Listeners will almost picture a man with a beard and long hair, a nouveau Jesus with his eyes closed and his lips brushing the mic while the crowd waits at the edge of anticipation.
The music picks up energy; new instruments make themselves heard, and a female vocalist lends her voice to powerful, eerie harmonies.
Oakley Hall dips its fingers into all the important sounds a solid country band should. Screaming guitars evoke memories of Neil Young. Hall's Jesse Barnes and Patrick Sullivan as vocal stylists are part Trey Anastasio, part Jeff Tweedy, while Rachel Cox sounds like a younger, throatier Gillian Welch.
Instruments are played wrenchingly and cleanly, but are not quite authentic, which has drawn them the above smattering of critical ire. There's a banjo, except it's actually a Fender electric strung to imitate a banjo. There's a fiddle, but it's run through a Marshall half-stack, played like nothing the genres have heard before.
There's nothing wrong with this experimentation. On one of the strongest songs off I'll Follow You, Claudia Mogel makes her fiddle scream like something living and livid.
The peak of the album comes when you turn the last song up as high as it will go, turn off the lights, close your eyes, and make believe you're riding the edge of a whiskey-drunk at a dark, crowded barn-burner.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
