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"Feb 14" from Drive-By Truckers' "A Blessing and a Curse"

Sometimes rock-and-roll bands can get away with being a one-trick pony, cuz if the trick is good, people will pay for it again and again and again. This, for example, is the story of the mighty AC/DC. This also seemed to be the case of the Drive-By Truckers. The punk-country-rock ensemble issued a pair of solid pre-millennium records with Pizza Deliverance and Gangstabilly, which included the epochal melding of country and punk in “The Night G.G. Allin Came to Town.” By the band’s 2001 breakthrough album, a meditation on “the duality of the Southern thing” called Southern Rock Opera, they had not only hit their stride but also cemented a style from which they seemed unlikely ever to break. Again, the successful one-trick pony will make you want that trick over and over. The Truckers managed that and continued with another pair of solid, honest, raucous efforts that explored the depths of deep southern Americana. They certainly had the trick down well enough to keep me showing up. Then along comes A Blessing and a Curse. This 11-song set sees the Truckers stepping back just enough from the old formula—tales of the struggle from below Mason-Dixon complete with Neil Young flourish and Skynyrd bravado—for what is a formidable, if not complete, break from their past. It’s their most consistently satisfying set of songs to date. Fans of Patterson Hood’s detailed storytelling or Mike Cooley’s inimitable brokenhearted drawl need not worry, it’s not like the band has turned to ambient knob-twiddlers or anything. A Blessing, however, does mark the first outing where the band has stopped pulling away the brush of backwoods Georgia, ceased wading the swamps of bayou and is no longer crashing the guard rail of Florida’s highways. While the Drive-By Truckers have, against the odds, become one of the great arbiters of the lost art of the concept album, they’ve shrugged it off this time around. What has clearly happened along the way is that they’ve morphed into a modern equivalent of the Band: three diverse songwriting voices who each take turns with stinging perfection. Largely written in the studio, A Blessing drops the focus of tying all the songs together yet reveals their most cohesive album as a whole. Hood’s opener “Feb 14” makes a fine bid for stadium rock in its big hooks, singalong simplicity and tunefulness, while “Aftermath USA” is a loose Faces/Stones stomp about a less-than-perfect household. Jason Isbell’s “Daylight” is the most un-Truckers piece on the record but could also be the best. Isbell conjures a blissful but bittersweet taste of pop reflecting a touch of 1970s AM. Cooley makes a 180 from his usual with the tender acoustic ballad “Space City.” This is still the Drive-By Truckers and the ragged, perfectly Crazy Horse guitar workout finds Hood asking, “Is that how yer gonna write yer story?” A Blessing shows how the DBTs are writing their story; it not only continues to get better but shows the authors have more than expected stashed just up their collective sleeves.