How can someone who hates country as much as I do like Second
Guessing so much?
There's no escaping the traditional roots of this second album from Oakley
Hall. They're ever-present — in the slightly slackened hoedown beats, in
the keening swoops of fiddle, in the mournful harmonies and all-natural
lyrical content. If a record could chew tobacco, this one would, no
question; never mind that they're all from Brooklyn.
Yet while a lot of country music seems, to me, to be hobbled by a nostalgia
for simpler times that never were, this one is not. There's a razor edge
to the guitars, a muscle to the melodies, an unflinching honesty in both
words and music that keeps Second Guessing genuine. Like Son Volt's
Trace or Neil Young's Harvest Moon, this is country tempered
by fire and hardened by rock, all impurities reduced to ash. It's not
sentimental at all. There are beer cans in the weeds and criminals in the
family tree. There are women saying "Why don't you fuck off?" to errant
males. It's a natural world, but not a sanitized one, where a slow, rocking
beat might be all that keeps you going as life and love fall apart.
Like Steve Wynn's Miracle Three (but in a completely different way), Oakley
Hall lace their country tunes with the drone of psyche, unleashing two long,
psychotropic marathons in "Hiway" and "Volume Rambler." "Hiway," which
opens the album, has the Doppler whine of long-distance travel, a circling,
mesmerizing mesh of guitar, bass and drums under the sweet-sour tangle
of male-female harmonies. It's a sort of triumph-over-adversity song, its
exuberant yelps and spinning fiddle solo all joy in the midst of troubling
lyrics. "Volume Rambler" is sparer, just drums and bass for the first half
minute, joined abruptly by stinging, bending electrified guitar. The song
stretches out, in no hurry at all to move along. The singing comes in only
after a minute and a half — time enough, in a cut that lasts eight and a
half minutes — and there are long mind-changing interludes of guitar, drum
and bass scattered
throughout.
Fans of Oakley Hall's self-titled album will notice that the band's sound
is a bit tighter, a bit more electric here. There have been significant lineup
changes since the debut. Pat Sullivan (once Papa Crazee from Oneida), pedal
steel guitarist Fred Wallace and fiddle player Claudia Mogel return for
Second Guessing, while drummer and bass player Greg Anderson and
Jesse Barnes are new. Another recruit, singer Rachel Cox (ex of the
Podunks and the Ospreys), makes an impact in cuts like "Blaze," where her
rich country alto gives the band a defiantly female-centric cast. As
before, Mogel's violin playing is wonderful, a wild, unpredictable element
in the band's most traditional songs.
The best song, though, is "Cod'ine," a slow-rocking lament shot through with
electricity, a song that's often covered but, for me at least, now belongs
to Oakley Hall. It starts with a weather-beaten murmur and builds slowly
with heartbreaking harmonies and a shuffling beat, with monstrous guitar
notes exploding out of the sad, sad chorus. "It's real, lord it's real,
one more time," Pat Sullivan wails, as the guitar crashes through and the
drums pound out a funeral cadence. And real is exactly what it is.
|
