Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter: Oh, My Girl : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

"Between them trees is all the world's fuckery," Jesse Sykes sings bitterly on the opening track of her second disc, Oh, My Girl. Her resolute tone, offset by a lone wandering viola, offers fair warning of what's to come: haunted tales of betrayal and loss, spun by a narrator who marks time by the seasons and speaks in beautiful, disarming nature metaphors. More backwoods than conventional alt-country, these ten pieces are quiet marvels of lamentation. They might move at a measured crawl, but the spell created by Sykes' frontier-woman wariness -- and the hovering-guitar atmospheres created by Phil Wandscher, the original Whiskeytown axman -- is utterly transfixing. Best experienced at night.