Drive-By Truckers – Brighter Than Creation’s Dark

I have never quite loved the Drive-By Truckers.

For one thing, I have always been a little put off by the awkward self-awareness of Patterson Hood’s ambitions. God knows the moral and cultural geography of the modern south cries out for cartographers, but it’s one thing to talk about a map — he talks about it a lot — and another to draw it. Hood is a messy draftsman, sometimes relying on broad lines when he needs shading, sometimes counting on vague gestures to carry meaning that he himself hasn’t really thought through. (“The duality of the southern thing” sounds smart enough when you hear him say it, but it doesn’t actually communicate much.) And like Paul Westerberg, one of his obvious influences, he’s gotten less funny as he’s gone along, maybe mistaking a straight face for seriousness.

Then there’s the matter of the tunes. Although the Truckers’ catalogue has plenty of good ones, Hood is kind of a journeyman when it comes to melodies and hooks. For every sing-along chorus (“My roommate’s gun got nine bullets in it”), there are a bunch of songs that get by on sturdy chord progressions and rock wallop.

Hood, to his credit, seems to know this, and has always been generous in giving space to his bandmates. The contributions of Mike Cooley and — for the three albums before this one — Jason Isbell have provided variation in tone and texture, not to mention some of the Truckers’ best songs. Still, by the time of A Blessing And A Curse in 2006, the band was in a groove that flirted with a rut. The midtempo rockers blurred together, and the vaunted three-axe attack tended to make the songs more loud than interesting.

But Isbell’s exit last year, under whatever version of events you choose to believe, created a natural break in the band’s development, a chance to pause and regroup. The Truckers reacted with the Dirt Underneath tour, playing stripped-down versions of their songs and reconnecting with old friends. One of those was Muscle Shoals vet Spooner Oldham, who appears on the new album. Another was pedal steel player John Neff, an original member who has long toured with the band and was invited in on a permanent basis. His fine, empathetic playing preserves but fundamentally alters the three-guitar lineup. And when it came time to record the new album, the third songwriting slot was filled, somewhat soap-operatically, by Isbell’s ex, bassist Shonna Tucker. (A rock ‘n’ roll breakup: He got the solo deal, she got the band.)

The result is Brighter Than Creation’s Dark, a wandering but largely satisfying album. It brings back some of the twang and front-porchiness of the past — the first track has a banjo — but the songs have a maturity you’d hope for from a band entering its second decade. And a pleasing modesty too, at least in declared intentions. There are stories of friends and family, smalltown oddballs and aimless old boys (and girls, courtesy of Cooley — “She’s got no money for a cab/She’s way too drunk to walk”).

“The Righteous Path” is a lament of an overstretched striver (“Got a whole lot of debt and a whole lot of fear”) that taps into the national mood without trying too hard to embody it. “The Opening Act” is a shaggy-dog tale of early band days that seems fueled by equal parts nostalgia and whatever the opposite of nostalgia is. Even Hood’s excursions into the bigger world — specifically, two songs dealing with the Iraq war — are more personal than political. Both have familiar protagonists — a soldier haunted by the killing he did, and a wife left alone at home with the kid — but their tight focus serves them well. (They would form a nice triptych with Isbell’s “Dress Blues”, which he initially performed with the Truckers before it ended up on his own album.)

Tucker is the album’s wild card, and her three songs would be welcome if only for her voice, which is unpolished, full and sharp, like a bar-band Stevie Nicks. But the songs are good too, and one of them — “The Purgatory Line” — is a highlight. Over a spectral arrangement of keening guitars and cymbal washes, she sings about the uncertainty and impatience of emotional limbo: “Sometimes I can laugh, other times I cry/Ain’t exactly funny, my feet are both on fire.” It’s an unresolved love song, but coming right after Hood’s portrait of post-traumatic-stress, it becomes something broader: a song about trying to get over something, but expecting not to.

Cooley, meanwhile, contributes his most-ever songs — seven, out of nineteen — and almost every one’s a keeper. He is the band’s strongest melodist, and his lyrics have an offhand, sideways quality. One begins, “Bloody nose, empty pockets/A rented car, a trunk full of guns,” and you don’t need to know it’s called “Checkout Time In Vegas” to get an idea what’s going on. “Perfect Timing”, on the other hand, is the breeziest song here, a good-natured shuffle about learning to live with yourself. Cooley also wrote my favorite track on the record, a catchy, half-hallucinated cultural history of the 1990s called “Self-Destructive Zones”. (“The pawn shops were packed like a backstage party/Hanging full of pointy ugly cheap guitars.”)

Despite the 70-minutes-plus running time, Brighter Than Creation’s Dark doesn’t feel either overloaded or epic. That is a credit to the generally strong material, and to its relative lack of pretension. Even the portentously titled closing track, “The Monument Valley”, which starts out referencing John Ford and “the ironic nature of history,” turns out to be about the complex compromises of adulthood. There are some big ideas here, but on the whole the concerns are more mundane than mythological, and the songs are all the better for it. The Truckers haven’t settled for anything, they’re still figuring themselves out. And if, seven albums in, their interests are smaller in scale and closer to home, that is mostly a sign of growing up. Which is good for them, and maybe good for the south, too.