By far the most quoted Drive-By Truckers lyrics are six words from Southern Rock Opera: "The duality of the Southern thing." Pinpoint-perfect yet still vague about just what that thing actually is, this line crops up regularly in reviews and features-- even four years and three albums later. Still, it's a useful phrase to describe the band's music. Their three-guitar rock is Southern in the sense that it sounds like Lynyrd Skynyrd and early .38 Special, but even more fundamentally, their songs are thoroughly and deeply saturated in the sap of the region.
The group's three songwriters-- Patterson Hood, Mike Cooley, and Jason Isbell-- trade in lyrics dense with details that are specific and local, never resorting to broad strokes or simple Southern archetypes, and their sympathies toward modern-day outlaws like the still-workers in "The Buford Stick" or the small-town drug dealer in "Putting People on the Moon" are ambiguous and conflicted, which seems like a condition that all Southerners live with to some degree or other. They write about the South as they see it personally, and about themselves as they've been shaped by living in the South. This is a considerable accomplishment, one very few present-day regional bands manage to achieve: It adds depth to the characters in their songs, and it gives their personal, more openly autobiographical confessions impossibly high stakes.
Of course, this balance between the band and its home was bound to wobble a bit eventually, and it's to the group's credit that it didn't happen sooner. Reportedly their first album written in the studio instead of on tour, A Blessing and a Curse is also Drive-By Truckers' first that doesn't present a larger picture of the South at all. There are hints and evocations on songs like "Aftermath USA" and "Little Bonnie", but no big statements. Few of these songs have the intense sense of place or perspective that distinguishes their previous efforts. If the Drive-By Truckers once sounded like they were speaking for a wide populace that is rarely represented in contemporary rock music, here they sound like they're speaking only for themselves. Yet, while the songwriters are front-and-center, they actually sound less prominent without their regional distinction to amplify their personalities.
While this new creative method doesn't prove particularly advantageous for a band that's built its reputation on solid live shows, it does have its share of blessings as well as curses. For one thing, it plays into the band's twin weaknesses for lots of guitars but relatively few riffs and lots of lyrics with relatively few melodies. Songs like the title track and "Wednesday", with its awkwardly generalized storytelling, sound practiced instead of spontaneous, calculated to appeal to an imagined audience rather than actually tested by real crowds. On the other hand, this approach frees the band up to broaden their scope. Mike Cooley's "Space City" possesses a gentle yet precarious ruminativeness, and on Patterson Hood's "Goodbye" a breezy, 1970s rock vibe offsets dark lyrics about dead and departed friends. Jason Isbell riskily attempts a soaring chorus on "Daylight", and even though he doesn't have the vocal range, the technical flaws only make his crisis seem all the more insurmountable.
Yet, for all the new tricks this in-studio approach allows them, the Truckers still sound like the same old Truckers-- maybe not always as powerful and urgent, but still undeniably themselves. "Feb. 14" recalls the impossible romance of "Something's Gotta Give (Pretty Soon)", and "Little Bonnie" is-- like "My Sweet Annette"-- a chapter in the Hood family history. A harsh, funny, lusty look at fame and expectations, "Gravity's Gone" is prime Mike Cooley, a song that never loses its slippery hook or tones down its ballsy frankness: complaining about the entertainment industry, he observes, "Cocaine rich comes quick and that's why the small dicks have it all." Hood's "Aftermath USA" starts funny as it describes the messy evidence of a wild night: "The car was in the carport sideways...heel marks on the roofline, bad music on the stereo". But as it progresses and the band's chicken-fried groove intensifies-- thanks to Jojo Herman's keyboard work and an always tight rhythm section-- the joke falls away and something sinister emerges: "Crysal meth in the bathtub, blood spattered in my sink...it's all worse than we think."
A Blessing and a Curse ends with "A World of Hurt", in which Hood delivers the verses in a sing-speak so confident and disarming it threatens to throw the whole album into new focus. Songs like this-- starkly stoic yet moving, drawing on influences that no one else in our little indie world is bothering with-- are why the Drive-By Truckers remain one of the best and most exciting bands to rise out of the South in a while. However, for the first time in the group's decade of existence, they've made an album that doesn't entirely live up to their reputation.
