Drive-By Truckers: Brighter Than Creation's Dark
New West Records
2008
Rating:


Drive-By Truckers comes to its eighth LP "Brighter Than Creation's Dark" with something to prove. After becoming Southern rock's critical darling with 2001's "Southern Rocker Opera" and 2003's "Decoration Day," the band released two uneven albums of declining quality, 2004's "The Dirty South" and 2006's "A Blessing and a Curse," that called into question whether Truckers is really in it for the long haul. Songwriter-guitarist Jason Isbell's departure from the group in 2007 to become a solo act (and divorce from bassist Shonna Tucker) further cast the future of DBT into doubt.

"Brighter Than Creation's Dark" finds Drive-By Truckers roaring back to life with a 74-minute, 19-track album that's a restoration of faith in the band as one of the greatest illustrators of Southern life in any artistic genre.

Patterson Hood's album opener "Three Daughters and a Wife" sets the tone for the Truckers' return to form. In the song Hood depicts a dead man reflecting from Heaven on "all the tiny moments of his life / Laying 'round in bed on a Saturday morning / [with] Two daughters and a wife." The song is lyrically aching and melodically piercing with returning band member John Neff's pedal steel adding extra pathos.

DBT has also always excelled at Lynyrd Skynyrd-style dirt-rock, like Mike Cooley's "Three Dimes Down." The song is laid-back and raucous, the perfect rock song for hanging out with friends, playing pool and drinking cheap beer in a dive bar. Hood's "The Righteous Path" is a barnstormer that expresses the struggles of an average man doing the best he can "to keep on keeping on."

What Drive-By Truckers has always done best is tell stories. Colley's "Bob" amusingly portrays a disappearing type of Southern man, the kind who "goes to church every Sunday," "likes to drink a beer or two every now and again," "takes care of his mama" and has "still got an antenna on a pole." "Daddy Needs a Drink" depicts a father who needs alcohol "to calm down the badness" while subtly acknowledging his working wife's equal need for a beer. "Checkout Time in Vegas," which provides the line that gives the album its name, is about a gun runner with "a bloody nose" and "empty pockets" who has until the buffet closes before someone in Sin City comes after him. "You and Your Crystal Meth" is a searing examination of the drug problem destroying small town America.

Perhaps most acute are two Hood-penned songs about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "That Man I Shot" opens with a scorching guitar line and lyrics that don't immediately align the song with the Global War on Terror. Gradually it becomes clear Hood's narrator is a soldier who has shot a man and is still grappling with the killing back at home. Though the shooting was in self-defense, the soldier wonders, "did he have little ones / That he was proud of that he won't see grow up? / Was walking down his street, maybe I was in his yard / Was trying to do good, I just don't understand." The roaring guitars underscore his unrest. In "The Home Front," a soldier's wife feels abandoned by a husband who has gone to war and betrayed by a country that misled him into going: "They ain't found a reason yet / We're all bogged down in a quagmire / And there ain't no end to it."

Drive-By Truckers makes music that paints the lives of Southern and Middle America with the kind of perceptiveness that's too often lacking in portrayals of small town life. At a time like this, it's a relief to have Drive-By Truckers back at the height of its powers.

Posted Sunday, January 27, 2008

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