Oakley Hall
Issue #33
I’ll Follow You (Merge)
By John Everhart
Published: September 1st, 2007 | 12:00am
Oakley Hall is Brooklyn’s finest — and maybe only — purveyors of Dixie-fried acid-rock. Toiling in obscurity over the course of three excellent full-length albums, the band seems poised for a breakthrough following a high-profile tour opening for Bright Eyes and Gillian Welch, not to mention their recent signing to Merge Records. On I’ll Follow You, the band creates a dizzying pastiche of cosmic spitfire jams and breathy psychedelic incantations, raising the stakes of their previous records with a cleaned up production aesthetic and more sophisticated songwriting.
The arrangements here are universally superb, encompassing a wide stylistic breadth. The psychotropic blitzkrieg of “No Dreams” is riotous, like Will Oldham being backed by Hawkwind, while the punch-drunk Gram Parsons-esque “Free Radicals Lament” finds front man Pat Sullivan carousing, “What starts like a supernova ends like a drizzling rain.” Still others are more downcast. Rachel Cox sings the tears out of the forlorn “First Frost,” eloquently guiding its slow burning gossamer melody with her keening, Lucinda Williams–like drawl.
Sullivan is the true standout here, his guitar histrionics veering from slashing wildly like Jimmy Page (“Best of Luck”) to picking adroitly like Richard Thompson (“All the Way Down”), while always carefully choosing the right notes and striking on a vibrant range of emotional hues. See the wash of dissonant reverb on “Rogue Revelator,” a discomfiting vignette in the vein of the Velvet Underground’s “Stephanie Says,” as the wayward musical backing buttresses his creepy sentiment of “The words of love I said / they never did intend to be believed / So I see you lady in repose.”
While Oakley Hall fits somewhere within the Neil Young–invented canon of “Rustic Americana,” they’re anything but anachronistic dustbowl revivalists. These cinematic sonic landscapes conjure surreal, impressionistic Paris, Texas–style imagery, and in the process define this great band’s own idiosyncratic milieu.
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