A Blessing And A Curse
Drive-By Truckers
Published by Under The Radar
A
Blessing And A Curse
Drive-By Truckers
Published by Under The Radar
They
say that great lyrics never made a great rock ’n’ roll song, but
that’s not for Drive-By Truckers to worry about—the Alabama-bred
master tellers have the musical musculature to support the weight of their words.
They got noticed with 2002’s aptly titled concept album Southern Rock
Opera, as perfect a work as they come, and maintained their divinely inspired
mix of three-guitar roadhouse stomp and shivery soft-side poetics through 2003’s
Decoration Day and 2004’s The Dirty South. Forty-nine
songs and scarcely a bum note.
It’s a lot to live up to, and with A Blessing and a Curse the
Truckers do and they don’t. There’s nothing on the album that personalizes
politics like Opera’s “The Three Great Alabama Icons”
or South’s “The Sands of Iwo Jima,” nothing that
seeds goose bumps like Decoration Day’s “Outfit”
or South’s “Goddamn Lonely Love.” Keeping its ambitions
manageable and its wheels on the rails, Blessing is a simpler pleasure
and ultimately a lesser triumph.
Guitarist/songwriters Patterson Hood, Mike Cooley, and Jason Isbell share duties
as always. Hood’s opener, “Feb 14,” is a catchy breakup rocker
that smells like a single (read: it’s pre-digested). Cooley’s “Gravity’s
Gone” misses musically and takes the tightly metered wordplay into uncharacteristically
boorish territory (“Cocaine rich comes quick/And that’s why the
small dicks have it all”). But Isbell’s “Easy on Yourself”
kicks up a signature rumble with its high-watt guitar wall and well-worded reality
check. Hood’s “Little Bonnie” marks the high point, a haunting
ballad of a deceased infant cousin that stands as another in a string of Trucker-built
monuments to the family unit (“All the men pitched in a bought a marble
angel”).
Closing with Hood’s “World of Hurt,” a gorgeous slide number
that affirms life in the negative (“Once upon a time my advice to you
would have been to go out and find yourself a whore…To love is to feel
pain, there ain’t no way around it”), Blessing succeeds
by pairing words and music with the best of them. It’s just that the Truckers’
own best is kind of a curse.