Album Review: Drive-by Truckers

Drive-by Truckers
The Big To-Do
[ATO Records]

Drive-by Truckers have been making solid albums filled with blue collar tales of Antebellum for the better part of two decades now. And with The Big To-Do, the band’s tenth album, they continue to prove why they are one of the great American rock bands of their generation. And it leaves me to wonder why in an age of pansy rock, is DBT one of the industry’s best kept secrets, and not on the cover of Rolling Stone, Spin, or Mojo.

This ends up a collection of gritty southern-tinted riffs, meticulously calculated grooves, or downhearted tales of woe.

Frontman Patterson Hood, returning from his solo stint with back-up band The Screwtopians last year, seems refreshed with a whole batch of songs about misfits and miscreants. Songs like “Drag the Lake Charlie”, “The Wig He Made Her Wore”, “This Fucking Job”, “After the Scene Dies”, and “The Flying Wallendas”, show Hood’s uncanny ability for flushing fully developed characters out in his lyrics.

Band mates Mike Cooley and Shonna Tucker help Hood with some of the the heavy vocal lifting on as usual. Cooley’s drunken swagger of a voice always serves as a compelling narrator for whatever warped story he’s trying to tell. Because Hood sings of misfits and miscreants, while Cooley’s stories are generally filled over-sexed drunks and bastards. This leaves Shonna to write sweet, soulful tunes about heartbreak and fading love, with a voice ripped from a smoky Delta show room from the 1940’s. Her two tracks on this album “You Got Another” and “(It’s Gonna Be) I Told You So” are show pieces of The Big To-Do, both serving as reminders of how big the real To-Do might actually get.