On their first two albums (1998's Gangstabilly and 1999's Pizza Deliverance), the Drive-By Truckers were supreme redneck jokesters, specializing in scabrous white-trash vignettes owing more to Southern Gothic fiction (Flannery O'Connor, Barry Hannah) than any sub-Mason-Dixon stand-up hacks. As the band matured and its de facto frontman Patterson Hood started writing songs that were weightier and more universal in sentiment, however, its more darkly off-kilter early work came to be generally viewed as juvenilia, the dicking around these guys did before they grew up into real artists. That would be a mistake, because songs like "18 Wheels of Love", "Bulldozers and Dirt", and "Zoloft" were wickedly clever and deeply revealing slices of Southern life that hold relatable truths for all listeners regardless of region. That said, it's a refreshing surprise that the group's latest album, The Big To-Do, finds Hood reconnecting with the macabre, with grim twists and booze-fueled mayhem, and with the dark corners of the American psyche.
The album begins morbidly with "Daddy Learned to Fly", its whining riff propelling the first-person reflections of a young boy whose father has died. It's a colorful kind of morbidity, however, as we learn the boy has been eased into an acceptance of loss by the creative lie that his father is perpetually flying the friendly skies. Weighing the most deadly serious facts of life against a highly skewed sense of irreverence has always been one of DBT's greatest feats, and it's a balancing act the group maintains throughout the album's raucous first half-- on the booze-fueled bottoming-out of "Fourth Night of My Drinking", the small-town sex scandal of the portentously delivered "The Wig He Made Her Wear", and the nasty little slice of backwater intrigue called "Drag the Lake Charlie".
It's a damn good thing Hood drops some of his gravitas, too, because his partner in crime, Mike Cooley (aka the Trucker you've always been able to rely on for witty shit-kickers) inexplicably contributes only three songs out of The Big To-Do's 13. Two of the three are great, as "Birthday Boy" offers up the musings of a savvy stripper while "Get Downtown" provides a shaggy snapshot of no-account losers outfitted to a shucking Chuck Berry groove. Still, that leaves quite a heavy burden on Hood's shoulders, even after you account for a couple of very nice turns from bassist Shonna Tucker, who was a bit of a weak link on Creation's Dark but who chills the blood here on the heartrending, hymnlike "You Got Another", then sets it racing again on the full-throated "(It's Gonna Be) I Told You So".
To his credit, Hood's restored mischievousness manages to carry the album for quite some time, but he starts to falter along the record's back stretch. "This Fucking Job" and "After the Scene Dies" are sonically torqued-up and admirably pissed-off, but their respective gripes against occupational drudgery and the death of the rock'n'roll dream represent well-trodden ground for this songwriter. The Big To-Do then proceeds to bow out rather unceremoniously with the relative whimpers of "Santa Fe", "The Flying Wallendas", and Cooley's sweet but tepid "Eyes Like Glue". The Truckers demonstrated with 2008's Brighter Than Creation's Dark that they don't need non-stop yuks and grotesqueries to reach greatness, but the best moments of The Big To-Do nonetheless offer tantalizing proof that these guys still possess fascinatingly warped minds when they feel like showing 'em off.
