The novelist Oakley Hall's American West was even more imagined, as in made-up, than Cormac McCarthy's-- go figure that he was the runner-up for the Pulitzer that McCarthy eventually won. But while McCarthy sat like a gentleman and endured Oprah's attentions on national television, he also made sure to tell her that back home in New Mexico, he doesn't deal much with other writers. Contrast that to the California-dwelling Hall, whose cosmopolitan sideline as a writer's writer and inspiration to famous recluse Thomas Pynchon makes him a regular Eli Cash. Which is to say that Oakley Hall the band choose their namesake wisely, picking the guy who figured out how to be plausibly sophisticated and wild bunch at the same time, even when it cost him plaudits on both ends.
The band's pedigree as Southern refugees is more convincing than most give them credit for, and anyone around New York probably knows by now that they fit in pretty well here, too. Lead guy Pat Sullivan founded the Brooklyn institution Oneida and then left, he says, in part because "Without me, they were able to streamline and get ferocious." I'll Follow You is Oakley Hall's fourth LP in three years. Their underpublicized days as an occasional "rough-around-the-edges honky-tonk band" that played weddings for cash are behind them, but it's stuff like those gigs that lets you know these guys may be many things, but they're not vain.
Another thing they're not is hippies, especially now that they've throttled out the last of the Oneida jamming sprawl. They may do long hair and peasant blouses and sundresses, but their sound is as much Carter Family as it is Allman Brothers (who weren't hippies either, right?). I'll Follow You certainly has its share of "the blues," the blues as an anesthetized trope that stands for melancholy and dust and unembarrassed hollering, rather than the kind of blues with a rhythm section and life experience and a really murderous sadness.
For instance: "Rue the Blues" is easily the most euphoric thing here, with that banjo-tuned-guitar, um, pickin' up a storm, I guess, and Sullivan opening his throat when he sings. One thing about not being embarrassed about who you are or where you're from is that your band can rev up a track like this one, complete with a Steve Miller Band turnaround three-quarters in, and not be tempted to somehow hide the fact when it comes time to record. Conversely, there may be a time or two where you forget to write an actual song and don't even realize it, like with "First Frost", a lap-steel ballad whose conceit is that fall is here and the seasons are changing and the grass isn't really green anymore and you could generally get the idea from the title and seconds one through five.
One way Oneida seems to have shaped this band, though it took a while, is in how seriously they take not just their harmonies and their drum synchonicities, but the guitar playing too. Besides "Rue the Blues", "Alive Among Thieves", "Rogue Revelator", and "No Dreams" all make surprisingly fierce riff showdowns, and if the vocal hooks on "Best of Luck" and "Marine Life" are Hicksville corny, they're also undeniable. One gets the sense that there will come a time when Oakley Hall will become so different from every other band in New York that they might start feeling alone, what with the virtuosity combined with the earnestness and the obliviousness, all appealing qualities on their own that together can feel-- for someone used to being pitched a bit more-- a bit like they've already left.
Which is to say they could actually get a job out there in the country that they came from, playing what would probably be a pretty big stage to people nowhere near their age. Why they don't is a different story. Maybe people around here love it a bit less but could use it a bit more, since Oakley Hall are the only ones doing what they do in New York who are any good at it.
