Flight tests. That's what Oakley Hall's previous efforts feel like after cranking I'll Follow You (2007), the band's high-flying debut for Merge. Working with producers Peter Katis (Interpol, The National) and Nicolas Vernhes (Fiery Furnaces, Ted Leo, Silver Jews) the Brooklyn sextet finally mastered how to best record and capture its wholly original rock & roll on this, their fourth full length. Of course, there are familiar musical touchstones - Richard & Linda Thompson, X, Doug Sahm, Neu!, the Funk Brothers, The Feelies, - but in the age of retro-everything, Oakley Hall reveals its knotted bloodlines in the course of severing itself from them. With I'll Follow You the sextet fully came into its own.

Conceived half on the road and half off, in a short break between tours, the album caps a head-spinning eighteen months that saw the band release two LPs in 2006, Second Guessing and Gypsum Strings (both mainstays on many critic's best of lists) and emerge from the Brooklyn underground through national tours with M. Ward, The Constantines, Calexico, Bright Eyes, and Gillian Welch.

Each one of I'll Follow You's 12 tracks unfolds a fresh permutation of earthy psychedelia, British folk, diamond-carved new pop, and krautrock's geometric throb with lyrics, courtesy of singer-songwriters Pat Sullivan and Rachel Cox, that eschew abstraction for confessionals as tangible as dog-eared atlases and dirty drains, mesmerizing arrangements by lead guitar and lap steel wizard Fred Wallace, Sullivan, and rustic drone-fiddler Claudia Mogel that balance grandeur and economy, and the taut rhythms of bassist Jesse Barnes and drummer Greg Anderson that rumble like a car over concrete. There's the interstate shout-along of "Rue the Blues" and the soft-focus groove of the title track. The swirling arpeggios of "Best of Luck" and the bare-knuckle harmonies of "No Dreams". The epic sweep of "All the Way Down," and the mountain tune "Take My Hands, We're Free" which closes the disc with a juxtaposition of dreamy voices and nightmare clatter.

Ditch your stereotypes about the urban and the rural, the traditional and the modern because none apply to The Hall. Sure, the harmonies are close, but as the Seattle Weekly's Brain Barr writes: "Americana they are not. The Hall is onto a whole new thing, and that thing is pure American rock music. Fuck Yes!"

Oakley Hall is ...

Jesse Barnes: Bass, Vocals
Rachel Cox: Vocals, Guitar
Claudia Mogel: Fiddle, Vocals
Patrick Sullivan: Vocals, Guitar, Organ
Fred Wallace: Guitar, Lap Steel
Pat Wood: Drums

www.oakleyhall.net/site/

04.02.2010

Brooklyn, NY

Knitting Factory

2003 - "Oakley Hall" (Bulb)
2006 - "Second Guessing" (Amish)
2006 - "Gypsum Strings" (Brah)
2007 - "I'll Follow You" (Merge)