Oakley Hall, I’ll Follow You

Southern California hipsters have been flogging the roots-rock idiom since at least the mid-’60s, when every third musician who rolled out of Laurel Canyon and onto the Sunset Strip had an acoustic guitar and a song to sing. The golden age of this stuff happened in the seventies, but unlike, say, disco, punk didn’t kill off SoCal roots rock, it just morphed into the L.A. cowpunk scene. Midwestern hipsters rediscovered this brand of roots rock a decade or so later in the mid-’90s and ushered in a minor music explosion variously called alt-country, No Depression, or Americana. But over the next few years, roots rock went on the wane. Many of those ’90s bands are still chugging along, but much of the excitement about the new, old music is gone. Now some cutting-edge Brooklyn hipsters are here to remind you about guitars and fiddles. Oh, and harmonies.

Oakley Hall’s I’ll Follow You, is almost like a first album, the sort where a band will put all the material they have been playing for years on a single album and because the songs for those first albums developed over years, they tend to be more varied than if the songs were all written in a short time. All of which is to say I’ll Follow You is long and varied. But it’s not a first album. In fact, Oakley Hall put out not one, but two albums just last year, making this their fourth overall. So I guess that makes them prolific. Ah, but does it make them good? Well…

The nasally male vocals bring to mind Eef Barzelay, who sings for the also New York-based Americana-ish band, Clem Snide (another similarity between these two bands is the literary origin of their names: Clem Snide is a character from William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, while Oakley Hall is a southwestern novelist). The female vocals bring to mind Neko Case. And when you put the two together, you get something that sounds remarkably like John and Exene from X. So, yeah, it’s good — especially when they do the harmonies. With considerable variation, the songs tend toward the slow, sad variety, which some people find excessively maudlin or, at the very least, tedious. Others of us, though, love the stuff. So if this is you, find something to mourn and put on I’ll Follow You.