Drive-By Truckers
CD REVIEW CD: Drive-By Truckers
Drive-By Truckers "Brighter Than Creation's Dark" (New West) *** ½
THE eighth album from this protean band completes one of the widest mood swings in recent rock history. After specializing in thematically cohesive albums and a revitalized brand of Southern rock, the Athens, Ga.-based Truckers are now all over the place.
That figures, given the changes in the group's core makeup. Rock-leaning guitarist Jason Isbell has gone solo, founding guitarist and pedal steel player John Neff is back, soul eminence Spooner Oldham plays piano and organ on the new album (in stores Tuesday), and bassist Shonna Tucker contributes her first songs.
The result is a sprawling, 75-minute immersion in the dynamic between Patterson Hood's Neil Young/Tom Petty-influenced folk and rock and Steve Cooley's mix of Rolling Stones, stone country and Band-flavored folk-rock.
It's tied together by the Truckers' customary focus on characters coping "in a world turned cold," pushed to the edge by various forces -- internal compulsions, military orders, financial desperation. It's not just good old boys this time. In "Goode's Field Road," a successful family man carefully plots his own demise.
The CD starts with a dream of heaven and ends in an encounter with John Ford, whose words of wisdom have been clearly heeded by the Truckers: "Tell them just enough to still leave them some mystery/A grasp of the ironic nature of history." That's a wrap.
--Richard Cromelin
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and another review by Stephen M. Deusner at http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2008/01/brighter-than-creations-dark.html
Why hasn’t Shonna Tucker been singing all these years? Brighter Than Creation’s Dark is the bass player’s third album with the Truckers, but the first where she writes and sings. Showcasing her rich voice and subtle twang, her slow, soulful songs “I’m Sorry Huston” and “The Purgatory Line” not only fit in well with the Truckers’ tapestry approach to Southern rock and Southern life, but actually expand on it, providing a feminine counterpart to Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley’s masculine songwriting. Ostensibly, Tucker is filling the position recently vacated by ex-husband Jason Isbell, who in five years had become an important element in the band’s three-guitar/three-songwriter attack. Despite his absence, Brighter Than Creation’s Dark may be the Truckers’ best and most expansive album since Southern Rock Opera—more tuneful than 2004’s The Dirty South, and less staid than 2006’s A Blessing and a Curse. The band expands its familiar rock sound with forays into soul (two members are progeny of Muscle Shoals musicians), Southern boogie, and AM-gold country—all in service to tales of hard-drinking fathers, vengeful ghosts, weird Harolds and director John Ford. Hood writes about Iraq vets on “The Man I Shot” and “The Home Front,” delicately and convincingly examining war’s emotional toll on soldiers and their families. But Brighter Than Creation’s Dark belongs to Mike Cooley, who contributes seven of his best, most rousing songs about hard-luck characters—the kind you know and probably avoid—proving the Truckers are at their best singing about people at their worst.
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Folks, you gotta be checking this group out. Hard to define them. Garage-bandy with true grit. I haven't heard them without Shonna singing, but Shonna good. Real good.
THE eighth album from this protean band completes one of the widest mood swings in recent rock history. After specializing in thematically cohesive albums and a revitalized brand of Southern rock, the Athens, Ga.-based Truckers are now all over the place.
That figures, given the changes in the group's core makeup. Rock-leaning guitarist Jason Isbell has gone solo, founding guitarist and pedal steel player John Neff is back, soul eminence Spooner Oldham plays piano and organ on the new album (in stores Tuesday), and bassist Shonna Tucker contributes her first songs.
The result is a sprawling, 75-minute immersion in the dynamic between Patterson Hood's Neil Young/Tom Petty-influenced folk and rock and Steve Cooley's mix of Rolling Stones, stone country and Band-flavored folk-rock.
It's tied together by the Truckers' customary focus on characters coping "in a world turned cold," pushed to the edge by various forces -- internal compulsions, military orders, financial desperation. It's not just good old boys this time. In "Goode's Field Road," a successful family man carefully plots his own demise.
The CD starts with a dream of heaven and ends in an encounter with John Ford, whose words of wisdom have been clearly heeded by the Truckers: "Tell them just enough to still leave them some mystery/A grasp of the ironic nature of history." That's a wrap.
--Richard Cromelin
------------------------
and another review by Stephen M. Deusner at http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2008/01/brighter-than-creations-dark.html
Why hasn’t Shonna Tucker been singing all these years? Brighter Than Creation’s Dark is the bass player’s third album with the Truckers, but the first where she writes and sings. Showcasing her rich voice and subtle twang, her slow, soulful songs “I’m Sorry Huston” and “The Purgatory Line” not only fit in well with the Truckers’ tapestry approach to Southern rock and Southern life, but actually expand on it, providing a feminine counterpart to Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley’s masculine songwriting. Ostensibly, Tucker is filling the position recently vacated by ex-husband Jason Isbell, who in five years had become an important element in the band’s three-guitar/three-songwriter attack. Despite his absence, Brighter Than Creation’s Dark may be the Truckers’ best and most expansive album since Southern Rock Opera—more tuneful than 2004’s The Dirty South, and less staid than 2006’s A Blessing and a Curse. The band expands its familiar rock sound with forays into soul (two members are progeny of Muscle Shoals musicians), Southern boogie, and AM-gold country—all in service to tales of hard-drinking fathers, vengeful ghosts, weird Harolds and director John Ford. Hood writes about Iraq vets on “The Man I Shot” and “The Home Front,” delicately and convincingly examining war’s emotional toll on soldiers and their families. But Brighter Than Creation’s Dark belongs to Mike Cooley, who contributes seven of his best, most rousing songs about hard-luck characters—the kind you know and probably avoid—proving the Truckers are at their best singing about people at their worst.
====================================
Folks, you gotta be checking this group out. Hard to define them. Garage-bandy with true grit. I haven't heard them without Shonna singing, but Shonna good. Real good.
posted by ms_lili @ 9:55 PM
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