ALBUM REVIEW: Patterson Hood Matures on ‘Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams’

It may have taken Patterson Hood a dozen years to get it out, but Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams was well worth the wait. The Drive-By Truckers co-founder is no stranger to making solo records—this is his fourth—but none are quite like this one. Crafted with help from the very artists for whom Hood has been an essential influence, and with a deep focus on new sonic territory and his own coming of age story, Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams manages to feel entirely fresh, no small feat considering the lifespan of some of its songs from an artist decades into a prolific career.

In the 12 years since his last solo record, Hood has remained busy with the Truckers, sidelining material of his own that never quite fit the band’s mold. Still, that desire to stretch himself never left him and this record finds him fully expanding in sound and vision. From the first few notes of keys and synth on opening track “Exploding Trees” — a recounting of the memory of a powerful storm’s impact — a dark hope seeps out that never lets up until album’s end.

Hood seems to be beckoning his listeners to buckle up for a passage through time and space with the song’s otherworldly textures and his almost meditative vocals. Fellow Alabama native Katie Crutchfield (Waxahatchee) drops in for the lovingly-weathered duet “The Forks of Cypress,” a ghost story that perfectly melds their voices set to the dreamiest, sloping guitar licks from Kevin Morby. Frequent Truckers road mate Lydia Loveless joins “A Werewolf and a Girl,” lending her crystalline vocals to a past lover’s perspective in an ink-black correspondence accompanied by foreboding horns. Wednesday brings their alt-rock youthful vigor to the nostalgia pop rocker “The Van Pelt Parties,” and eerie strings saturate “Airplane Screams,” one of the eldest songs in the bunch, finally perfected into a sonic orchestral boom for this outing.

Hood is walking proof that with age comes no less imagination and with time, memories become mythic. Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams is a powerhouse set from an artist who doesn’t conflate self-assuredness with complacency. It’s all thrills from beginning to end as Hood mines the lore of himself and toes the line between fantasy and reality, an ambitious challenge to which he rises, eagerly.

Patterson Hood’s Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams is out Feb. 21 via ATO Records.