{"id":7316,"date":"2025-12-10T14:47:03","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T14:47:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/reviewed-drive-by-truckers-the-definitive-decoration-day-152488\/"},"modified":"2025-12-10T14:47:03","modified_gmt":"2025-12-10T14:47:03","slug":"reviewed-drive-by-truckers-the-definitive-decoration-day-152488","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/reviewed-drive-by-truckers-the-definitive-decoration-day-152488\/","title":{"rendered":"Reviewed: Drive-By Truckers \u2013 The Definitive Decoration Day"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Drive-By Truckers that went into Chase Park Transduction studios in Athens, Georgia in 2002 to record Decoration Day<\/em> were, in a couple of important respects, a different band to the one who had made its predecessor, 2001\u2019s Southern Rock Opera<\/em>, an astonishing double concept album somehow assembled on a shoestring. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Drive-By Truckers that went into Chase Park Transduction studios in Athens, Georgia in 2002 to record Decoration Day<\/em> were, in a couple of important respects, a different band to the one who had made its predecessor, 2001\u2019s Southern Rock Opera<\/em>, an astonishing double concept album somehow assembled on a shoestring. <\/p>\n

Most obviously, there had been a rearrangement of personnel, not the Truckers\u2019 first or last. Guitarist and occasional songwriter Rob Malone had left, replaced by a 22-year-old kid from north Alabama called Jason Isbell. Along with this promising addition, Drive-By Truckers had acquired a couple of other things at least as significant. For the first time in the almost two decades that founders Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley had been playing together, they had (some) money, and a reasonable expectation of an audience. Southern Rock Opera<\/em> had been a minor hit. It turned out that there was, after all, a market for an old-school Southern rock band with a new kind of idea of the South, as a place both less and somehow more romantic than previous apologists or detractors had presented. \u201cThe duality of the Southern thing\u201d, they called it. <\/p>\n

Importantly for the album that Decoration Day<\/em> would become, however, this modest success had been bought at considerable cost. It is exhausting even to read Drive-By Truckers\u2019 touring itineraries of the early 2000s. One chunk of October 2002, to cite a more or less random but pretty typical fraction of this self-inflicted punishment, included 12\u00a0shows in 14 nights in eight states. Enduring this had left all concerned somewhat frazzled, and in Hood and Cooley\u2019s cases, wondering whether this was really any way for men nearing 40 to be living. On the guilelessly titled \u201cHell No, I Ain\u2019t Happy\u201d, a piledriving rocker that would have fit well amid the rowdy furies of Southern Rock Opera<\/em>, Hood roars from the back of the van, \u201cEighty cities down, eight hundred to go\/Six crammed in, we ain\u2019t never alone\/Never homesick, ain\u2019t got no home\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But this was something else that had changed between writing Decoration Day<\/em> and recording it. For Hood and Cooley, going places now also involved leaving people. If the album has one emblematic line, it is Cooley\u2019s \u201cAnd \u2018Lord knows, I can\u2019t change\u2019\/Sounds better in the song than it does with hell to pay\u201d: it\u2019s one thing to exult in Lynyrd Skynyrd\u2019s \u201cFree Bird\u201d when you\u2019re young, another trying to live it as middle age looms. Decoration Day<\/em> becomes a long grapple with maturity, burdened by the fear that its composers might have got what they wanted too late to be able to keep it. \u201cThe drifter\u201d, laments Cooley elsewhere in \u201cSounds Better In The Song\u201d, \u201cholds on to his youth like it was money in the bank\u201d. <\/p>\n

Southern Rock Opera<\/em> had been, in terms of its sound, very much a clue-in-the-title record. On Decoration Day<\/em>, Drive-By Truckers draw on a much broader range of Americana, as they had on formative albums Gangstabilly<\/em> and Pizza Deliverance<\/em>. Hood re-embraces orthodox country on \u201cMy Sweet Annette\u201d and punkish alt.country on \u201cThe Deeper In\u201d \u2013 the latter an anguished and compassionate telling of the woeful true story of a pair of biological siblings imprisoned in 1997 for consensual incest, but not before they had produced four children. <\/p>\n

He goes raucous, revved-up rockabilly on \u201cSink Hole\u201d, conveying a struggling farmer\u2019s fantasies of interring a foreclosing banker in the titular abyss. Cooley\u2019s contributions include the escalating, menacing choogle \u201cWhen The Pin Hits The Shell\u201d, an elegy delivered with a snarl, decorated with a keyboard solo by Spooner Oldham, and the exquisite acoustic closing ballad \u201cLoaded Gun In The Closet\u201d, a study of a couple held together by mutual appreciation of each other\u2019s desperation; marriage as a Mexican stand-off. It\u2019s a grimly appropriate finale, and also about the most optimistic contemplation of domesticity on the album. <\/p>\n

Hood\u2019s other contributions include the self-explanatory \u201c(Something\u2019s Got To) Give Pretty Soon\u201d and \u201cYour Daddy Hates Me\u201d. The former is a Replacements-like mid-tempo affair, caught between shuffle and swagger, in which Hood despondently diagnoses the cause (\u201cLiving hard to chase the dream\/Way beyond our ways and means \u201d) and the effects (\u201cYou say you just want compromise\/Then act different all the time\u201d). The latter is a malevolent, almost Sabbath-esque plod, as if the heavy metal records beloved by the teenage Hood have become the only appropriate backdrop for his middle-aged wretchedness (\u201cYou always knew I was a screw-up\/Long before I screwed us up\u201d). <\/p>\n

On Cooley\u2019s exuberant boogie \u201cMarry Me\u201d \u2013 a title that in context sounds more like a dare than a proposal \u2013 he nails the couplet that summarises their predicament: \u201c Rock\u2019n\u2019roll means well\/But it can\u2019t help telling young boys lies\u201d. Jason Isbell, at this early stage of his life, had not yet learnt these and other things the hard way, though he had recently married Shonna Tucker, who plays upright bass on \u201cSounds Better In The Song\u201d and would formally join Drive-By Truckers shortly afterwards (their eventual divorce would inspire a good few songs itself). <\/p>\n

He writes of what he does know, which at this point is his family, their home and the lore of both. The album\u2019s title track is Isbell\u2019s inhabitation of a foggily remembered real-life feud between the Hill and Lawson clans of Alabama. Though Isbell is descended from the Hills, he sings from the perspective of a Lawson maintaining a grudge which has long since superseded the original grievance: people who are angry without being entirely sure why are a recurring theme in the DBT canon. <\/p>\n

\u201cOutfit\u201d still seems unlikely to be dislodged from the top five songs Isbell will ever write. The bonus live album included with this reissue<\/a>, a largely acoustic set recorded in Athens in June 2002, features the first-ever performance of the song; already, the audience whoop at several of the better lines. \u201cOutfit\u201d channels Isbell\u2019s own father, whose story Isbell tells with Springstonian economy. His narrator and\/or dad reflects that \u201cI used to go out in a Mustang, a 302 Mach 1 in green\/Me and your Mama made you in the back, and I sold it to buy her a ring\u201d. You know the guy instantly: he loved his freedom, and he misses the car that furnished it, but when one thing led to another he knew what his responsibilities were, and he doesn\u2019t want his boy to make basic mistakes of his own. <\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t call what you\u2019re wearing an outfit\u201d is good advice; \u201cDon\u2019t let \u2019em take who you are, and don\u2019t try to be who you ain\u2019t\u201d is better. When Isbell introduces \u201cOutfit\u201d on stage now, he sometimes notes that it\u2019s a favourite of people who either have a great relationship with their father \u2013 as he appears to \u2013 or a terrible one. <\/p>\n

Patterson Hood has always insisted that Decoration Day<\/em> is, in its way, as much of a concept album as Southern Rock Opera<\/em>, and he would know. It\u2019s an album about choices and consequences, and whether we really get much say in either. It was also the second Drive-By Truckers album of which someone could reasonably wonder: is this the greatest rock\u2019n\u2019roll record of the 21st century? They\u2019ve made at least another half-dozen contenders for that title since.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The post Reviewed: Drive-By Truckers \u2013 The Definitive Decoration Day<\/a> appeared first on UNCUT<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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