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Blessed Event
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Drive-By Truckers: A Blessing and A Curse
New West, 2006
Rating: 4.3
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Posted:
April 21,
2006
By
Kevin Forest Moreau
Three years ago,
in a review of
Drive-By Truckers' Decoration Day, this writer (tongue somewhat in
cheek) compared the band's career breakthrough,
Southern
Rock Opera, to the heavy metal concept album Operation: Mindcrime.
Now, obviously, the Truckers aren't much like Queensryche, save for the fact
that those two albums considerably elevated their respective bands' game and
public profile. If anything -- as long we're in a comparing mood -- A
Blessing and A Curse, the Athens quintet's sixth studio album, suggests
that they have more in common with Rush: Like Decoration Day and
2004's The Dirty
South, Blessing is a cohesive theme album on a par with that
band's latter-day output.
The theme in question, as the title suggests, is duality -- specifically, as
ringleader Patterson Hood puts it on the closing "A World of Hurt": "'To
love is to feel pain' / There ain't no way around it." That hard truth
informs a number of the eleven songs on Blessing: There's the elegiac
"Goodbye," a sober and contemplative valediction to a once-unbreakable
friendship grown distant; "Little Bonnie," about a boy who lives with a
family's enduring pain over a sister who died before he was even born; and
Mike Cooley's soberly mournful "Space City," in which a widower reflects
that "I ain't ashamed of anything my hands ever did / But sometimes the
words I used were as hard as my fist."
Elsewhere, the notion of duality plays out in less specific ways. On the
kick-start opener "Feb 14," Hood raggedly implores a lady-love to "Be my
valentine" despite being greeted by "Flowers flying 'cross the room / Vases
smashed against the floor." In these songs, the pain of loving takes a back
seat to the pain of simply living. "Aftermath USA" finds a hard-partying man
waking up to a harsh reality of "Crystal Meth in the bathtub / Blood
spattered in my sink" and finding hints of infidelity in his car: "Smell of
musk and deception / Heel marks on the roofline / Bad music on the stereo /
All the seats in recline."
That song's protagonist never quite acknowledges that he might need to
change his ways, but that deficit is made up on two of the album's stronger
tracks. Cooley's bracing "Gravity's Gone" laments a world where "What used
to be is gone and what ought to be ought not to be so hard," with a chorus
as hard to shake as the realization that "I've been falling so long it's
like gravity's gone and I'm just floating." Similarly, Jason Isbell's
"Daylight" boasts an indelibly soaring shout-along chorus, its narrator
allowing that "I might look these lessons in the eye."
But Blessing's thematic threads aren't confined to the lyrics of its
three accomplished songwriters. In the tradition of Southern Rock Opera,
which dove trucker-cap-first into the thick chords and triple-guitar boogie
of Lynyrd Skynyrd as a metaphor for punks and rockers coming of age in the
Deep South, Blessing plays out its subject matter on a musical level.
That blessing and curse of the title could just as easily refer to the
Southern Rock tag with which many identify the Truckers since the release of
Opera.
While there are unmistakable traces of that swampy, sweaty sound,
particularly in the three-guitar sturm und twang of the title track,
at other points the Truckers openly embrace their rock and punk roots, as if
hoping to stomp that nettlesome Southern Rock label into the ground. The
aforementioned "Aftermath" nicks the classic carnal boogie of the Rolling
Stones circa the '70s, while "Feb 14" and the quick, jagged "Wednesday" lay
bare Hood's oft-cited love of the Replacements.
Those influences are more pronounced on Blessing than ever before,
but their presence isn't a major shock to anyone who's dug beneath the
surface Skynyrd riffing of Opera. It's a more subtle change than one
might expect, but no less profound for that fact. The same is true the
song's looser, more general narratives, which dial down the specific
geographic references and story-songs about Southern icons -- Ronnie VanZant,
Buford Pusser, Carl Perkins, George Wallace -- that have graced past
Truckers records.
More shocking than those omissions is the declaration Hood makes at the end
of "A World of Hurt," intoning that "It's great to be alive" with a grave
restraint more powerful, in its way, than the forceful sermon that Cowboy
Mouth drummer Fred LeBlanc often makes of the same sentiment. It's not an
outlook that flows in abundance in the band's catalog, but like the musical
and lyrical shifts Blessing so deftly navigates, it nonetheless feels
right. On an album full of contrasts, that seeming contradiction resonates
loudest and longest.
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