By Don Allred
Oakley Hall: I'll Follow You (Merge)
Like their namesake (a historical novelist who knows just how wild the real Wild West was, and is, in ways that still reach the modern mind), the psychedelic-country-rock band called Oakley Hall finds its own orientation, its own well-traveled road. Oakley Hall’s modes, minor keys, drones, and eerie harmonies, the precarious alliances of male and female voices, surging through imagery and rhythm, force their way into the wilderness, at whatever cost---the how and why of it make up stories they tell themselves and other listeners on the fly, just as the people in their songs are always picking up the pieces of personal (and some musical) history, starting or continuing another expedition. The 2006 release Gypsum Strings was their tightest and yet boldest album, the sound of self-proclaimed “anti-romantics” challenging acceptable limits of realism.
Oakley Hall’s brand-new I’ll Follow You builds on the breakthrough of Gypsum Strings, but not with any sense of self-congratulation. As before, brooding verses can be pulled, by the very last syllable and note, into harmonies of up to four voices, when rattled by the mesh of three guitars, a lap steel, an organ, a fiddle, bass, and drums, any or all of which might be employing pedal effects at any given moment. But there’s always a sense of one voice among many, basically alone. The music brings release, but also tilts forward, into a new tension, among 12 songs in just over 49 minutes. Brave ’n’ sexy ballads like “All The Way Down” and “I’ll Follow You” lead eventually to encounters with “Alive Among Thieves” and “Rogue Revelator, “ where exotic sounds whirl menacingly around calm, plain-speaking voices of betrayal (there’s no “freak folk” whimsy in Oakley Hall’s music). The last song takes these misadventures into account, but ends with a line that’s the same as the title: “Take my hands, we’re free,” a woman mutters darkly, before raising her voice brightly, “Take my hands, we’re free!” Then she seems to vanish in the first second of sunlight. Don Allred
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