Music Review: Indie Round-Up – Drive By Truckers, Empires

Drive-By Truckers, The Big To-Do

There are so many bands out there, you miss things even if you're a person who listens to a fair amount of music. I've been dimly aware of Drive-By Truckers for more than a decade. Making their belated close acquaintance now, through their tenth disc, I'm left with mixed feelings.

The first two songs really kick, especially "Daddy Learned to Fly." Then there's a batch of underwritten tracks, including a couple by band members other than primary singer/songwriter Patterson Hood. There is something romantically captivating about bassist Shonna Tucker's unadorned voice, and something cosmic about the band's swirling arrangement of her slip of a song, "You Got Another."

But too many of the songs blandly charge by without dynamics and with minimalist Jane's Addiction style melodies over unemotional chord progressions, a combination that works only intermittently. "Get Downtown," for example, tries hard for a fuzzy, good-old-rock-and-roll style, but there's little in Mike Cooper's voice to get your soul dancing.

As for Hood, his reliance on repetitive melody lines over angular chord changes results in flattened-sounding dissonances which at their best grow hypnotic. In the subtle "After the Scene Dies," the monotone notes evoke the barrenness of the dead cultural scene depicted in the lyrics, where "the club becomes an Old Navy." In other cases, like "Drag the Lake Charlie," the effect is merely grating.

Tucker's "(It's Gonna Be) I Told You So" effectively mixes a 60's-girl-group structure with pealing guitars and throbbing organ, while the keening, chunky-beated "Santa Fe" suggests the influence of Neil Young, whom the Truckers have backed up. But the painfully plodding "The Flying Wallendas" memorializes the famed acrobats into the ground.

There's a cool chaos to the soundscapes Hood and Co. splash all over this album like Jackson Pollocks with guitars. I'd dig it a lot more if more of the songs cohered into the emotionally affecting images suggested by the best few.

Article Author: Jon Sobel

Jon Sobel is Co-Executive Editor of Blogcritics and lead editor of the Culture section. As a writer he contributes most often to Culture, where he reviews NYC theater; he also covers interesting music releases and writes a semi-regular review round-up of independent albums. …

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