The Big To Do: Not as big as past DBT but very good

A lot is made in rock criticism of invention. Rock critics are obsessed with hearing new sounds and new ideas. In order for a record to be truly great, it needs to give us something we've never heard before. This has been true of some of the greatest bands of my generation: R.E.M., U2, Sonic Youth, Pavement, Radiohead to name a few.

The Drive-By Truckers haven't invented much musically. They don't veer far from well-established conventions of country and southern rock. They have a thoroughly modern and raucous approach to the music, including a three-guitar attack that at times sounds like Sonic Youth covering Lynard Skynard, but the approach to song structure is well-worn. There are regular verses, choruses, guitar solos, etc. It's new music, but it's familiar.

Yet, while there's nothing new in the Truckers' musical approach, the band's remarkable songwriting, it's absolute mastery of genre and the ability of its two main song writers, Patterson Hood and Mike "Stroker Ace" Cooley, to tell riveting stories makes the band one of the truly great American rock bands of the last decade. At some point, isn't it good enough to just play rock and roll really well? And to do it honestly?

Great rock and roll is in healthy supply on The Big To Do, the band's latest 13-song studio album (it's 6th since 2001's excellent Southern Rock Opera). Like all other DBT albums, The Big To Do is full of raw and ruthless guitar work, a healthy dose of honky-tonk twang and a thumping rythm section that would make Muscle Shoals proud.1 These guys could be called the ultimate bar band (though that description is a bit overused) but they are better than that -- a band of consummate professionals in every way.

And, again, there are the songs and the stories. Chuck D once called rap in it's 1988-92 hey day, CNN for black people. DBT's Hood and Cooley are Faulkners of the trailer park. Consider several of the tales from the album:

The opener "Daddy Learned to Fly" is narrated by a young boy who believes his departed father is on a nonstop flight. In "That Wig He Made Her Wear," a narrator relates a case in which a preacher's wife kills her husband and gets a light sentence when the jury learns the man abused her and made her wear a pair of high heels and a wig before sex. And on "Birthday Boy", a world-wise stripper offers a birthday boy some advice.

Hood and Cooley are masters of the oddball tale. They are champions of the losers and the little man.2 And more so here than on 2008's excellent Brighter Than Creations Dark -- on which the subject matter was more serious -- the tales are sinister and completely twisted. There are no songwriters in contemporary music I know of who tell stories like these.

In "Drag the Lake Charlie," a narrator asks just that after a local trouble maker named Lester goes missing. The narrator hopes they do find Lester at the bottom of the lake:

Remember what happened last time Lester went on the make
I heard it took the cleaning crew two weeks to clean the bar
They never found that teenaged girl
They never found the car.

In "The fourth night of my Drinking," the narrator gets a day closer to his demise with each drunken episode. From the song:

On the third night of my drinking I was yelling at your house
I had a stick in my hand and was convinced that some man was in there hiding out
I had a foot on your door; you had me down on the floor
I woke up next morning and my jaw was sore

It's this rotating cast of gothic southern characters that puts DBT over the top. The Black Crows can do southern rock. But they cannot write the kind of gritty-real tales of Hood and Cooley. It's what truly separates DBT from the ordinary.

The Big To Do is not as strong as Brighter... or the Dirty South, both of which are masterpieces in my opinion, even if they are not thoroughly innovative. There are great songs here, but all 13 are not as strong as some of the band's prior work. Shonna Tucker's vocals offer a nice change of pace -- she sings on two songs, here -- but she's not the songwriter her bandmates are. Her sings slow the album down a bit.

Still, for fans of the band, or for fans of straight-up, no bullshit American rock, this is a terrific album by an accomplished, hard-working band.

Footnotes
1. The Truckers trace their roots to that musical mecca. Hood's father David Hood was the bassist of the Muscle Shoals Rythm Section and Hood, Cooley and bassist Shonna Tucker are all from the region though the band is now based in another big music town: Athens, Ga.

2. The first DBT song I heard that I really liked was "Puttin' People on the Moon," from The Dirty South. In the song, a down and out narrator turns to petty crime to support his family when he can't find real work. He plaintively asks mid-song: "If I died in Colbert County, Would it make the evening news? / They too busy blowin' rockets, Puttin' people on the moon."