a short story collection\u2014Faulkner with a modern twist, full of late 20th century Southern gothic characters<\/a>.\u201d The canvas for The Unraveling<\/i> is wider, but its frame of reference remains the same.<\/p>\nIn tackling their second album in a row of explicitly political songs, Hood says he and Cooley had to ask themselves \u201cHow do you write about the daily absurdities when you can\u2019t even wrap your head around them in the first place? I think our response was to focus at the core emotional level.\u201d One look at the song titles, rife with Bibles and guns, Armageddon, heroin, grievance merchants, and babies in cages, and you understand the Drive-By Truckers let that raw emotional core loose and left everything they had on the studio floor. <\/p>\n
Said studio\u2014Sam Phillips Recording Service in Memphis, built in 1962 by the man who shaped the sound of early rock and roll\u2014no doubt contributed to the elemental power of this album. Opener \u201cRosemary With A Bible And A Gun\u201d eases you in with an impressionistic fable of being \u201ctwenty-five and on the run\u201d north to Memphis and an escape from the oppressive life Rosemary and her lover are trying to leave behind. With that evocative setup, \u201cArmageddon Comes To Town\u201d goes off like a bomb, its fat electric hook exploding in your ears as the song builds from there until an increasingly desperate Hood sings \u201cWhen it all comes down, Armageddon\u2019s back in town \/ You can\u2019t tell the rabbit from the hat.\u201d Next, Cooley chimes in with \u201cSlow Ride Argument,\u201d big, pleasantly distorted guitars driving a tune whose fevered restlessness lets up only for a two-line bridge that asks nothing more than the impossible: \u201cSlow down take it easy \/ There\u2019s no going home again.\u201d <\/p>\n
Just when you might expect them to ease off on the intensity, it ratchets up, with a twist. The next tune features twin acoustic guitars and a bounding bassline counterpointing the album\u2019s bitterest and most unforgiving lyric, as \u201cThoughts And Prayers\u201d rages against the feckless, corrupt leadership that refuses to take any meaningful action to prevent school shootings. \u201cThe Powers That Be are in for shame and comeuppance \/ When Generation Lockdown has their day \/ They\u2019ll throw the bums all out and drain that swamp for real \/ Perp walk them down the Capitol steps and show them how it feels.\u201d That sense of responsibility for the world we\u2019re leaving our children also pervades \u201c21st<\/sup> Century USA,\u201d a wistful catalogue of the sins and failures that have brought us to this moment.<\/p>\nThe second half opens with the gothic Southern Rock of \u201cHeroin Again,\u201d the one tune here that feels like it crosses the line from argument into harangue (\u201cSilly young man why you using heroin? \/ I thought you knew better than that\u201d). Ah, but then you arrive at the beating heart of this album, the devastating, unmerciful lament \u201cBabies In Cages.\u201d Against a dark, funk-inflected beat, Hood sings his heart out, apologizing to his children for the world they will inherit while asking the question at the root of it all: \u201cAre we so divided \/ That we can\u2019t at least agree \/ This ain\u2019t the country that our grandpas fought for us to be? \/ Babies in cages.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the home stretch, Cooley returns to the mike to take on the \u201cGrievance Merchants\u201d who fan the flames of the victim complex animating the far right: \u201cMerchants selling young men reclamation \/ Merchants selling old men back their dreams.\u201d It\u2019s a big-boned, rather Neil Young-ish rocker that eventually gives way to the eerie opening of final track \u201cAwaiting Resurrection.\u201d Against spare, foreboding bass and drums, Hood takes the listener by the hand and draws us inexorably into the swirling heart of darkness: \u201cGuns and ammunition \/ Babies in a cage \/ They say nothing can be done \/ but they tell us how they prayed \/ In the end we\u2019re just standing \/ Watching Greatness Fade.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m sorry we\u2019ve forsaken every lesson we\u2019ve been taught,\u201d sings Hood at one point, and it\u2019s that sense of responsibility that haunts and drives the narrators of these songs. If American Band <\/i>warned of the coming storm, The Unraveling<\/i> takes the measure of the devastation that\u2019s been wrought in just three years, and the ugly debts our current leaders are leaving at the feet of the generations to follow. This album is a hard listen, but no harder than the last few years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":33989,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[8658],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-45817","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-drive-by-truckers","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/45817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45817"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/45817\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51943,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/45817\/revisions\/51943"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45817"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=45817"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=45817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}