Singing for a New South

Drive-By Truckers- Brighter Than Creation's Dark

Jackson Free Press

January 30, 2008

The Drive-By Truckers are an old-school southern-rock band. In 2001, they released “Southern Rock Opera,” which will go down as the best southern-rock album of the decade. The band proudly touts their three-guitar attack (a la Skynyrd) and will defend the South ’til death. But unlike many other popular southern-rock bands, the South the DBTs represent is one in which Robert E. Lee and Martin Luther King can coexist as heroes in history. The DBTs represent a South that hasn’t been co-opted and boiled down to the solitary symbol of the confederate flag.

But Southerners generally overlook the content of DBTs’ songs, which don’t highlight newsmakers who hang nooses from trees or protest the removal of the Ten Commandments from a courthouse. The protagonists of the Truckers’ songs are unpretentious, often ignored people who have common problems; problems such as having to worry about the foreclosure on the family house, or not having the money to keep up with the rising cost of living. In their songs they put a human face on these ubiquitous issues without ever getting too preachy.

On Jan. 22, the band released their seventh studio album, “Brighter Than Creation’s Dark,” which perfectly fits into this vein. The studio record matches the energy and quality of their live displays, and shows the band’s gradual shift from southern arena rock to country. Patterson Hood, who is half the main singer/songwriting team, and bassist Shonna Tucker have a beautiful chemistry that fits somewhere between the duos of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, and Frank Black and Kim Deal from the Pixies. You can hear this on the opening track, “Two Daughters and a Beautiful Wife,” on “Daddy Needs a Drink” and on the heart-breaking song, “The Home Front.”

Soul-music legend Spooner Oldham played the piano, organ and Wurlitzer on more than half the songs on the album, giving the Truckers’ sound a dimension not heard on any of their previous records.

Mike Cooley, the other half of the songwriting tandem, continues to pen strong songs as well, generally acting as the outlaw voice to counterbalance Hood’s play-it-straight voice. For every forlorn, self-destructive character that Cooley presents, like the narrator and Lisa in “Lisa’s Birthday,” Hood will introduce a persevering character, such as in “The Righteous Path.” It’s the feeling that both their characters will end up in the same dreary place that gives the music its power.

The main problem with the album, as with most DBT records, is the length. Clocking in at nearly 80 minutes, at times you wish they had trimmed some of the fat off the album, or at least a couple minutes off the five minute-plus songs.

“Brighter Than Creation’s Dark” continues the Drive-By Truckers’ tradition of creating straightforward, intelligent music, and they remain one of the few bands that intellectuals and hillbillies can agree on.

Original Article