newcritics

It’s undoubtedly an oversimplification, but to me there are two fundamental models for rock bands–the first involves a style that is tight, punchy, and carefully arranged, the second involves a more ad hoc approach, a style that wheels and sprawls played by a band coloring outside the lines, piling lick upon lick, squealing uncomfortably to a stop when the group stops at all. I think of the first sort of band as the British model (the Beatles of course being the epitome) and the second sort as the American model.

Which brings me to the latest sprawling slab of rocked-out Americana from Muscle Shoals’ own indie-rock darlings (by way of Athens, GA), Drive-By Truckers.

DBT is definitely a band on the American model—a gut-bucket group built around a three-guitar front with a rock repertoire that borrows effortlessly from country and soul. The ingredients are familiar enough, especially in Muscle Shoals where Trucker Patterson Hood’s father David was the first-call bass player on hundreds of classics sessions (original Muscle Shoals electric pianist Spooner Oldham–composer of I’m Your Puppet– has become a de facto Trucker on this album).

But DBT is unusual too: on the one hand self consciously redneck, on the other hand conceptually ambitious, after all DBT made its bones with Southern Rock Opera a two-disk song cycle on the theme of growing up southern in the 70s, inspired by the career of Lynyrd Skynyrd, and featuring a song in which the devil welcomes George Wallace to hell. DBT don’t play yr father’s southern rock.

Brighter Than Creation’s Dark, the first Truckers album since the departure of Jason Isbell (one third of the band’s original front line) is probably DBT’s least conceptually rigorous record—less Zen Arcade and more the White Album: a rangy collection of songs alternatively written by Hood, guitarist Mike Cooley, and bass player Shonna Tucker.

The songs are still typical Truckers: closely observed character sketches and dramatic vignettes (the opening song is a cinematic first person narrative from beyond the grave told by a loving young father who has died suddenly).

But only occasionally do these songs don’t look back either to childhood or to a mythic America (Cooley’s fantastic elegy for rock, Self Destructive Zones, for example: The hippies rode a wave putting smiles on faces/that the devil wouldn’t even put on a shoe/Caught between a generation dying from its habits/and another thinking rock and roll was new).

Mostly the album casts a cold eye on a dark here and now, depicting a nation suffering through a profound shared hangover.

In particular the songs written by Hood, the band’s resident conceptualist, cut right to the heart of the contemporary American condition. Take for example the opening verse of The Righteous Path, a great little rocker that rides the most minimalist of melodies:

I got a brand new car that drinks a bunch of gas
I got a house in a neighborhood that’s fading fast
I got a dog and a cat that don’t fight too much
I got a few hundred channels to keep me in touch
I got a beautiful wife and three tow-headed kids
I got a couple of big secrets I’d kill to keep hid
I don’t know God but I fear his wrath
I’m trying to keep focused on the righteous path

Or the Iraq war lurching rocker That Man I Shot:

That man I shot, I was I his homeland
I was there to help him but he didn’t want me there

Or the hauntingly-stripped down You and Your Crystal Meth:

You lost your family and wrecked your truck, I used to love you but now you suck
We were friends, among the best; You and your crystal meth.

Cooley’s songs run from the Exile-ish hedonism of 3 Dimes Down to beautifully crafted character sketches of rural life on the skids (from Bob: Bob goes to church every Sunday, every Sunday that the fish ain’t biting…Bob takes care of his mama,/she’s the only one he lets call him Robert; from Lisa’s Birthday: It’s always Lisa’s birthday when I get that call/She’s got no money for a cab, she’s way too drunk to walk, Lisa’s had more birthdays than there are sad country songs) to what seems like a morning after murder ballad, Checkout Time in Vegas: A bloody nose, empty pockets, a rented car with a truckful of guns/It ain’t true that the sun don’t rise in Vegas….)

If the album’s themes are deliberately contemporary, its sound is deliberately retro, recorded not to hard disk but to 2-inch analog tape and presented as if it comprised four sides of a two-album set. But unlike other DBT records–and, again, like the White Album–this is an album that works just as well from a to z or played with songs selected at random, with, as Griel Marcus once wrote of the White Album, gems scattered like crumbs.
On a more British model is ex-Trucker Jason Isbell’s first solo album, Sirens of the Ditch, released last summer and backed by the rest of DBT minus Cooley. Sirens isn’t a better record than Brighter, but it is an easier listen, full of real hooks, hummable melodies and fantastic layered electric guitars.

Like Brighter..., Sirens has plenty of public moments written in monologues and mini-dramas, like The Devil is My Running Mate:

The devil is my running mate.
Confusion is his favorite state.
Surely you folks can relate.
I know we’ve gathered here to hate.

Or the Iraq war song Dress Blues:

Now the high school gymnasium’s ready,
full of flowers and old legionnaires.
Nobody showed up to protest,
just sniffle and stare.
But there’s red, white, and blue in the rafters
and there’s silent old men from the corps.
What did they say when they shipped you away
to fight somebody’s Hollywood war?

But the album’s best moments come in personal vignettes like Try (You can’t make her love you out of fear), In A Razor Town (Don’t take sorry for an answer unless you really want what’s left) or Shotgun Wedding (So how about a shotgun wedding? What about your dignity? What about a different setting? What about me?). These are songs that present emotionally complex, adult entanglements in a way that’s rare in pop narrative and rarer still in pop music.