Drive-By Truckers raise stakes as ‘American Band'
On their 11th studio album, “American Band” (ATO), Drive-By Truckers are a band renewed.
The guitars sound rude, the voices raspy, the songs weathered, weary and introspective, even when the choruses ring out like news bulletins. At a time when artists from Kendrick Lamar to Beyonce are making albums that combine protest and poetry while dominating pop-culture discourse, the Drive-By Truckers have made a record that will not sell nearly as well but emphatically belongs in that conversation.
It might be easy to take Drive-By Truckers for granted. After all, the band has been steadily releasing albums for 20 years, a run of consistency that belies the revolving-door lineups. Even more so than the band's no-nonsense, rock-with-a-dash-of-punk-and-soul swagger, the songwriting has been a consistent calling card. Jason Isbell — now an acclaimed solo artist — and others have contributed to a catalog bursting with gems. But the two constants since the start have been Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, and the singer-guitarists who first joined forces in college during the mid-'80s swap songs that seethe and simmer on “American Band.”
It's being billed as the band's most political record, but that's selling it short. This is a record about the notion that the so-called melting pot that is America is in reality more often like a collection of cul-de-sacs, a country divided by suspicion and fear. At the heart of these 11 songs is a plaintive question: How is one to live in a democracy when everyone who doesn't look, talk or act like you is perceived as a misfit or a threat?
Or as Cooley sings on the anthemic “Surrender Under Protest”: “The victims and aggressors just remain each other's others.” The storm cloud whipped up by the guitars contrasts with Hood's contemplative “Guns of Umpqua,” a haunting melody that tells a harrowing tale: A military veteran finds himself in a firefight on a college campus besieged by a terrorist.
“Made it back from hell's attack in some distant bloody war, only to stare down hell back home,” Hood sings.
Even as the songs address racial and economic inequalities — society as a war zone over property, money and status — they do not settle for easy answers or finger-pointing. Amid the clanging guitars of “Ramon Casiano,” Cooley describes a little-publicized murder decades ago and spins a four-minute mini-history of an America in which guns, race and justice intertwine and determine fates.
Answers don't come easily in this world, as Hood wrestles with “What It Means” and Cooley contemplates the lessons learned and lost by generation after generation in “Once They Banned Imagine.” The band's feel for melodies remains sharp, and Hood's accomplished songwriting is now matched by Cooley's, which makes for one of the band's strongest front-to-back albums. At a time in their career when most bands are struggling to match past glories, the Drive-By Truckers sound like the stakes are higher than ever.
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