The Scene

The Drive-By Truckers fly the flag for southern-fried rock and roll and have done since their masterpiece double concept album Southern Rock Opera was released in 2001, but that flag ain’t a confederate one. The Truckers may have always written songs that offer a voice to the downpressed and disillusioned. It’s kind of their thing to complicate stereotypes and all that… though that certainly doesn’t mean they’re out to Make America Great Again or anything.

You don’t listen to a Truckers album for pick-me-up tunes of patriotism and pride, they’ve been out there exposing the ugly in America for two decades now. As it happens, America’s as ugly right now as it’s been in a long time and the result: a politically charged Truckers album.

About time, one might say. They’ve always tackled big issues before, poverty and prejudice and the likes. Generally with a tinge of anti-establishment like the good young punks they once were in a previous band. This year though, they’ve been open Democrats, playing their tunes on the convention trail. So it goes when you’ve got an over-grown oompa loompa spouting the same bigoted diatribe that Patterson Hood and company once came down hard on George Wallace for. Hell, that was a history lesson right there in a song – and one that ended in hell too.

Maybe as songwriters they’d have hoped for a little change in the other direction but when there’s a woman and a child stuck in the top floor of a burning building, you call Superman to save them and when there’s a politician running for national office on the back of policies endorsed by the KKK then you call the Drive-By Truckers.

The Songs

Ramon Casiano – Gun violence, border crimes, immigration issues and political corruption all in the guise of a four minute gut-kick of a rock and roll song.
Darkened Flags on the Cusp of Dawn – A muffled warning of a riff that leads off, portending trouble and a bit of anger. Based on South Carolina flying the battle flag while all others were at half-mast. Christ, America has some serious problems.
Surrender Under Protest – Wailing guitars and sharpened words. Just a hint of darkness to paint the frustration. Pretty standard R+R structure with plenty of purpose.
Guns of Umpqua – One of their typical character tunes. An Iraq vet makes it back alive, soaks up the beauty of freedom and then finds themselves ducking for cover in a school shooting. “I made it back from a distant and bloody war only to stare down hell back home.”
Filthy and Fried – Another Cooley effort, he has such a way with his vocal delivery. Maybe not the best singer but he wrings every word. Mid-tempo guitar tune about getting wasted in a post-feminism society. Sort of. It’s a good one, don’t let me ruin it.
When the Sun Don’t Shine – Gentler this time, Hood letting the darkness weigh him down. Acoustic plucking echoing the vocal melody, sweetly affecting.
Kinky Hypocrite – A real strut of a tune, weaving around a bit of southern slam poetry from the man Cooley. All about the pricks who profit.
Ever South – Patterson going for perspective with a prowling history lesson of White America built around a repeated drum pattern and the odd ominous guitar lick.
What It Means – What does it mean? Nobody seems to have the answers but at least the Truckers are asking the question. Black Lives Matter, a pocket full of skittles. Acoustic driven tune, plenty of room for the words to thump home. Like the organ flourishes too.
Once They Banned Imagine – John Lennon’s Imagine was placed on a banned 100 list after 9/11 for being controversial, so Cooley takes that take to task with a mournful enquiry.
Baggage – The only extended guitar solo lives herein, the closer going hard at grief and depression. Something about it makes me think of Robin Williams. You’ll hear what I mean.

The Vibe

The album is called American Band and for once there’s no Wes Freed artwork, the fellas clearly going serious with a darkened flag. Which is also the name of a song here, wouldja believe it.

And for what the record sets out to achieve, there couldn’t be a stronger opener than Ramon Casiano. It’s a Rolling Stones type rocker, full of strut and layered guitar, but the story is deadly tragic. The tune, penned by Mike Cooley who gets a damn near 50/50 split here, tells of a young Hispanic kid murdered by another youngster down by the border – where it all started and still is today. The American kid grew up to become a border agent, pioneering a particular brand of corruption and inhumanity before joining the NRA where he guided them from a sporting group to a political one, refusing to budge on issues of gun rights and pretty much foreshadowing the stubborn Republican Party of today – which is already talking about blocking any legislature supported by Hillary Clinton should she win the election (this is being written before all that junk takes place).

It’s repulsive, really. Democracy is a matter of incremental change but you can’t achieve even that when one side sits firmly in petulant protest. This is oppositional politics at its worst and the man who had such an influence in those tactics was a murderer and never served time or nothing, channelling his hatred into all the wrong places.

“He had the makings of a leader of a certain kind of men

Who need to feel the world’s against him, out to get ‘em if it can.

Men whose triggers pull their fingers, men who’d rather fight than win

United in a revolution, like in mind and like in skin…”

His name was Harlon Carter. Google his story if you want to feel heartbroken about society for a while. The way that Cooley sings that verse, dragging out the last line after spitting most of it out with vitriol, is something staggering. It’s such a powerful tune and in the final verse he swings it back around to 2016 in a bit of framing that kinda scarily reflects the tragedy of this tale back upon the current climate of growing global conservatism.

The rest of the album touches on the same sorta issues. From immigration (Ever South) to racism and gun violence (What It Means) to Confederacy holdouts (Surrender Under Protest) to those that profit from politics and religion (Kinky Hypocrite) and so on, so forth. You get the idea.

The Truckers have never made a bad album and this is probably their best for a few records now – possibly even since Jason Isbell left the band but let’s not split hairs. When they target in on an issue they’re not those to hold back, they go for the throat. All the way through their existence that’s been one of the best things about this brilliant band, just how well they can empathise with their characters and how sharpened the arrows can be. It’s a pleasure to say that as Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, the two song-writing geniuses that form the core of the band and always have, can still get it done like that.

“We want our truths all fair and balanced as long as our notions lie within it

There's no sunlight in our asses and our heads are stuck up in it

And our heroes may be rapists who watch us while we dream

But don't look to me for answers coz I don't know what it means”

That’s Patterson Hood in What It Means, a song he wrote a few years ago when Trayvon Martin was killed and in 2016 it remains as relevant as ever, so it’s gotten an official release. In that stanza there he’s pretty much summed up the American Presidential Election. The world’s an increasingly complicated place where less and less is certain and yet despite that – perhaps in response to that – we’re seeing people out there doubling down on their political leanings. Becoming more conservative, becoming more liberal. There’s no agreement or compromise and that goes both ways too. The Basket of Deplorables are one thing but the Democratic side of things are so convinced that the right is evil that there’s zero dialogue. It’s terrifying to think that this is where so-called freedom has taken the most powerful nation on the planet… and what that might mean for the rest of us.

Good thing for the Truckers then. An outsider band that came to fame singing of the duality of the south now supplying a rare bit of perspective on and increasingly binary situation, where personalities seem to overshadow issues. What ever happened to the days when politicians were boring and soulless? Can we have that back, please?

The Music

It’d be a lie to say that every song here is politically charged, though they all do tie in with the overarching theme. As far as the tunes themselves go, it’s the same Truckers of the last few albums that we know. Guitars reign, the drums sound full and great, there’s a flash of organ and more than a couple solos.

Which is not to say that there’s a pattern for a Truckers song, they can do damn well anything. But the riffs here crunch hard on tracks like Surrender and Ramon Casiano. At this point they know exactly how to build a song like that and they still do the trick and I really do wanna say that Brad Morgan’s drumming is superb on this. Nothing too complicated but with all the right feel, aside from Hood/Cooley, he’s the longest serving member having been in the band since 1999. Matt Patton’s bass is fairly fresh on the scene while Jay Gonzalez joined after the golden era that ended with Isbell skipping the scene to do his own thing (Jason Isbell remains one of the absolute best songwriters on the planet right now, don’t sleep).

It’s refreshing to hear rock and roll being used for political assaults once again. I mean, this is music that used to scare parents. It’s supposed to be transgressive and threatening but by this stage it’s all been so commercially coerced that it’s rare to find anything like that which still packs a punch. There isn’t really a straight ahead rock music anymore. Post grunge everything went towards the alternative and mainstream rock since has been… what, the Foo Fighters? Kings of Leon? Sure, those are good bands. But nothing more. If you ask me, I think the Drive-By Truckers are the finest southern rock band there’s ever been and I say this as a Skynyrd fan. Not only that but their record since the turn of the millennium rivals anyone you can name.

Maybe that’s a rare positive amidst the trash heap that’s been 2016 in politics. There’s a reason for the creative and the instructive to rebel once again. I’ve quite enjoyed a few selections from Dave Eggers’ 30 Days 30 Songs project – which is now expanded to 50 songs, yay - full of a month’s worth of anti-Trump songs. Aimee Mann’s one is brilliant. There’s been plenty of satire in telly and films too but honestly that stuff’s all lacking the bite that they need. As much as everyone seems to enjoy the Saturday Night Live impressions, they’re just buffoonery. True satire is scathing. Once again, good thing the Truckers still know how to turn it up to 11 and stick in the knife.

Revelations

“Someone killed Ramon Casiano, and Ramon still ain’t dead enough.”

Mike Cooley: "What I’m trying to do is point straight to the white supremacist core of gun culture. That’s what it is and that’s where its roots are. When gun culture thinks about all the threats they need to be armed against, what colour are they?"

“We should light out for the trees or the great beyond

Light out for the love of thee, we build our lives upon

Cast aside the hurtful things that bear the fruit of scorn

Darkened flags on the cusp of dawn”

Patterson Hood wrote a piece for the New York Times a while ago about the Confederate Flag and its persistence despite the horrors it represents which is well worth a read.

“Everyone claims that the times are a-changing as their pass them by. And everyone’s right.”

Patterson Hood: “I’ve always considered our band to be political. I’ve studied and followed politics since I was a small kid. I got in trouble in third grade for a paper I wrote about Watergate – the teacher sent a note home to my parents saying I was voicing opinions about our president that she didn’t appreciate. That’s the one time I got in trouble at school where my parents sided with me.”

“The greatest separators of fools from their money party harder than they’d like to admit.”

“And I hear we weren’t welcomed here, at least not in those days. No one needs our drunken, fighting, thieving kind”

From the press release: “Of course the personal can also be politic, represented here by Hood’s deeply felt "Baggage." Penned the night of Robin Williams’ death…” Oh, I was right then. Makes that song even sadder, really.

Bloody oath: “Further creative inspiration came from a pair of American milestone pieces of art, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ National Book Award-winning Between The World and Me and Kendrick Lamar’s TO PIMP A BUTTERFLY, "in my opinion, the greatest musical work of our current time," says Hood.”

“All this weight can be salvation when the air is much too thin but it can pull you down too far to climb back out”

Finale

I’m so bored by what passes for politics these days and frankly more than a little worried about what that’s doing to people out there. Somehow a deranged, power-hungry, attention-craving muppet of a man has been allowed to run all the way for President and along the way he may have eased up on the wall-building but he’s definitely built a wall between voters by straight up indulging them in all their paranoia and hysteria.

If the media attacks the bastard for his disgusting words then they’re biased. It’s an agenda. There’s no losing here for a guy with an ego so big that he cannot admit fault in himself even on the smallest of things, let alone in the global spotlight, so there’s always an excuse, always a reason to doubt the truth. I kinda like Hillary Clinton but I’ll freely admit she’s a long way from an ideal candidate. If Barack Obama was running again then he’d have annihilated Trump. Mate, if Michelle Obama was running then she’d have slaughtered him too. I’m just glad I’m not American so I don’t have to carry the burden of what that country has become.

Which is a reality TV show (right up Trump’s alley). All personality at the expense of issues. Buzzwords and catchphrases instead of facts and arguments. Insults rather than education. It’s ripping apart an important social fabric and getting in the way of conversations that the public needs to be having but thankfully there are people of influence out there, like the Drive-By Truckers, who have a little more dignity than that. I’d even go as far as to say that this record has reinvigorated a great band.

Like, the Truckers can go through the motions better than most bands can do it at their peak but it’s been a few years since we’ve heard them this charged. It’s fierce and relevant and one of the more important albums released this year, if I do say so myself.