Heaven or hell, they each have their house bands-this could be the theme song for purgatory.īack in 2015, Patterson Hood published an essay in the New York Times Magazine expressing the disgust he felt after seeing people wave the Confederate flag at a Drive-By Truckers concert. Nearly nine minutes long, its empty spaces marked only by faint and shadowy instruments, “Awaiting Resurrection” bears little resemblance to the Southern rock that Drive-By Truckers long invoked. He wonders whether he’ll get reincarnated as a dog, a bleak joke worthy of Leonard Cohen, the vaudeville penitent. Acid curdles Cooley’s wry voice as he mutters about “a conspiracy to water down his blood/And it’s all the fault of it, or them, or they.” The final track “Awaiting Resurrection” finds Hood overwhelmed by religious imagery, seeking some glimmer of illumination. Mike Cooley was always the more conversational singer, an unhurried narrator “Grievance Merchants” uses that style to expose the psyche of a far-right creep.
Hood falters after that, mocking the bromides applied to mass murder there’s a moment of catharsis, some deserved disdain, but he ends up landing halfway between satire and jeremiad, dependent on the same hollowed-out language he criticizes.Ī few disarming passages of The Unraveling reconsider the lyrical modes the Truckers have come to lean on. Distorted electric washboard blares through “Babies in Cages,” a consuming echo, as Hood writes ICE detention centers into the Book of Revelation: “Standing in the darkness to answer for our sins/Children changing each other’s diapers in a pen.” His first image in “Thoughts and Prayers” is equally unnerving-gruesome stillness hovers over a mass shooting, screens aglow with news of the violence surrounding them. From “Rosemary” onwards, the vocals sit a touch lower than usual. The Unraveling takes meticulous care with each mix. The new songs move like anguished monologues, probing for a source of horror, as if Hood and Cooley decided that narrative distance would amount to emotional abdication. Aside from opening track “Rosemary with a Bible and a Gun,” which conveys a drifter’s flight with spiraling internal rhymes, there are no lingering portraits here.
The mood of mounting disaster recalls 2008’s Brighter Than Creation’s Dark, perhaps the greatest Drive-By Truckers album-released just after guitarist Jason Isbell left the band, with bassist Shonna Tucker's 2011 departure leaving founding members Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley as the lone remaining songwriters. The Unraveling turns political anxiety inwards. The group’s previous record, American Band, arrived alongside the 2016 election, its subjects bluntly topical: “Ramon Casiano” told the story of a Texas teenager murdered in 1931, whose killer later became a border patrol cop and NRA lobbyist.
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