Oakley Hall
Gypsum Strings
Brah/Jagjaguwar



Brooklyn sextet Oakley Hall is led by singer/guitarist Pat Sullivan nee Papa Crazy ex-Oneida. The triple-guitar quadruple-singer spread on 'Gypsum Strings', the band's third long player, invites comparison to the new Major Stars and Neil Hagerty's The Howling Hex. Like those groups, Oakley Hall plays a hybrid of farm/biker rock, deeply rooted in the sweaty turn of the '70s, albeit swimming down a smoother stream with the heavy vocal harmonies rolling by like mountain logs.

House Carpenter features totally Sullivan-d guitar lines, like his work in Oneida but stripped of the scuzz and lubricated with psychedelic mountain syrup. Claudia Mogel's violin is churned through a tremolo box in Living In Sin In The USA and elsewhere it competes with the guitars for top spot, and gives them a good run. Mogel and especially Rachel Cox's vocals are the right medicine. There's lots of arse-blasting psych in the first half of the album while Nite Lights, Dark Days sees Cox strain, "He'll be prancing all around me like a pony on cocaine".

Guitarist Fred Wallace's banjo comes out a couple times, once alongside guest Brian Chase's tabla on Bury Your Burden and on the closing Spanish Fandango, where the band hangs up the electrics and plods off politely after a sweet 40-minute dose of The Band doing 'Liege And Lief' high on wildweeds.

Lenin Simos