Calexico, Oakley Hall

Tuesday, September 19, 40 Watt Club

originally published September 13, 2006

Authenticity is often overrated and overzealously critiqued in the world of music. This is most evident right now with rap, but it's also particularly notable with country music. Often an artist is considered somehow less valid because he is from the North or Australia or some unspecified former Eastern Bloc nation instead of Tennessee or a trailer park. As Southerners, I suppose it's well within our rights to be wary of such musical carpetbaggers, however short-sighted it may be. Still, there are several good reasons why you should set such concerns aside and head out to see scurrilous Yankee country-rock band Oakley Hall with all due haste. Here are a few of them.

First off, the members are not all Yankees. At least two members (one entire third of the band!) hail from the true South, specifically those mystical lands of legend: Alabama and North Carolina. Secondly, it doesn't matter where folks are from as long as the music's good. Thirdly, Oakley Hall's music isn't just good, it's excellent; the band's strain of psychedelic country rock resembles a slightly more fried and frenzied poke through the Doug Sahm or Flying Burrito Brothers playbooks. Fourthly, bandleader Pat Sullivan, formerly known as Papa Crazee and cofounder of the amazing band Oneida, still wields that guitar like a conjuring stick, even after losing half a finger in a freak table-saw accident. Finally, the two albums the band has put out in 2006, Second Guessing and Gypsum Strings, are two of the year's finest. And most finally, Oakley Hall live is like a small-scale E Street Band, an overwhelming juggernaut of rootsy, hard-scrabble swagger and tales of real-life, blue-collar livin', except instead of a hulking dude with a sax there's a pretty fiddler lady.

Garrett Martin

Garrett Martin