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19 songs on their latest album show many faces of the South
Published on Sunday, Jan 27, 2008
BRIGHTER THAN CREATION'S DARK
Drive-By Truckers
New West
Through a half-dozen studio albums since 1998 the Drive-By Truckers have revealed a mission: Come up with a song for every kind of person in the modern American South.
There are 19 more on their new album, Brighter Than Creation's Dark, including family men, criminals, drunks, workers, addicts, soldiers, even musicians. The music is a wide-ranging idea of Southern rock that draws on not only the amalgams made by bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers, but also on their sources and roots. Over the past decade songs from the Drive-By Truckers have juxtaposed observation and fiction, autobiography and allegory, but not a lot of ego.
The band was founded by the songwriters Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley. They make the songwriter the lead singer, so the band regularly switches between the high, weary voice of Hood and the growly drawl of Cooley. On this album another singer and songwriter steps forward: Shonna Tucker, who has been the band's bassist since 2003. (Her ex-husband, Jason Isbell, left the Drive-By Truckers and started a solo career last year.) On its way to depicting the entire South, with Tucker the band now has a gutsy voice representing women too. She works up to muscular roots-rock in Home Field Advantage.
Instead of aiming for a particular trademark sound, the Drive-By Truckers have always let the song dictate the style. They can be noisy and turbulent, as in That Man I Shot, a soldier's post-battle reactions set to a feedback-drenched Crazy Horse stomp, or steadfast and long-suffering, as in the album's other Iraq war song, The Home Front, Hood's sketch of a soldier's family.
They can be calm in pedal-steel-topped ballads like Bob (''He always had more dogs than he ever had friends'') and Daddy Needs a Drink. They can play straightforward country, like Lisa's Birthday (''It's a good thing her dancing shoes don't run on gasoline''), or nearly avant-garde rock, like the piano drone of You and Your Crystal Meth.
This is a typically crowded Drive-By Truckers album; it doesn't need all 19 songs. But the overload is part of the point. In this band's America all kinds of characters show up.
— Jon Pareles
New York Times
BRIGHTER THAN CREATION'S DARK
Drive-By Truckers
New West
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