eMusic

Start Your Trial

A Blessing and a Curse

by

Drive-By Truckers

 
  • Pick
A Blessing and a Curse
view larger image View Larger

Rate it!

Avg: 4.0 (289 ratings)

Southern rock band turns up the sound of suffering.

  • We Say...

    Review by Keith Harris

    The Drive-By Truckers have got a lot of big ideas. Always did, even if Patterson Hood and his southern-rock cohorts initially smothered their smarts in tasteless humor, rolled around in muddied distortion, and rushed the results past you at punky speeds. Inevitably, though, the band soon sought a form grand enough to contain the breadth of their obsessions, and the 2001 two-disc Southern Rock Opera was just what it says — the cultural history of the modern American south, as refracted through the career of Lynyrd Skynyrd, with loud, messy guitars. Whew.

    The new A Blessing and a Curse, however, would seem to tip-toe back a few inches into the personal. It's the sound of three men, each attempting to shake off an emotional hangover (and maybe the physical kind, too) and hold his life together. Mike Cooley, the gut-level absurdist, meets heartache with incredulity, proudly spitting in the face of degradation on "Gravity's Gone," resenting his inability to come to move beyond that pride on "Space City." At the opposite end is the rawer pain of Jason Isbell, who blasts unearned self-forgiveness on "Easy on Yourself" and hopes desperately that "I might become some brand new kinda guy" on "Daylight." Somewhere in the middle rests Patterson Hood.

    The band's brain and conscience both, Hood has been the conceptual spark for the Truckers, and he nails the album's theme with the rollicking "Aftermath USA." Shaking off a spree-induced fog, he details the damages of who knows how many lost nights: the tub's full of crystal meth, social services are threatening to take the kids, the radio's still blasting shitty music from his totaled car, and meat's rotting in the freezer. As with his bandmates' songs, there's little sense here that his situation is linked to a world outside his personal experience. For maybe the first time in the Truckers' career, there's no politics, no economics, no history, no legends or celebrities poking their noses into the singers' lives. This time, there's nowhere to hide.

  • They Say...

    Review by Mark Deming, All Music Guide

    2001's Southern Rock Opera catapulted the Drive-By Truckers from their early status as another alt-country band with a joke name into one of the smartest, edgiest, and most talked-about hard rock bands in America, and since then they seem to have taken the thematic consensus of Southern Rock Opera as a lucky piece -- while 2003's Decoration Day and 2004's The Dirty South weren't concept albums like SRO, their tales of hard living and difficult circumstances in the American South gave them a unified feeling that turned the band's fine songs into an even more cohesive whole. With A Blessing and a Curse, the Truckers take a step back from this approach for the first time since their breakthrough -- most of the album's 11 songs were written in the studio during the recording sessions -- and though the sound and the feel of these tunes is consistent with the band's previous body of work, A Blessing and a Curse sounds like a collection of individual pieces rather than a coherent and organic whole. But the pieces sound great -- Patterson Hood, Mike Cooley, and Jason Isbell remain a triple-threat team as guitarists, songwriters, and singers, and the tough, funky report of Brad Morgan's drums and Shonna Tucker's bass drives this music with both groove and force. The hard-earned wisdom about matters of the heart related on "Space City," "A World of Hurt," and "Feb. 14" cuts deep down to the bone, as does the day-to-day emotional chaos of "Aftermath U.S.A." and the title cut. The Drive-By Truckers have never sounded better in the studio as they do on "A World of Hurt," Without polishing away their personality, producer David Barbe and mixer John Agnello get the band's three-guitar onslaught on tape with equal shares of muscle and clarity, while the tight interplay between the players suggests the Rolling Stones at their Sticky Fingers/Exile on Main St. peak as much as the DBTs' oft-cited role models Lynyrd Skynyrd. A Blessing and a Curse doesn't try to tell one big story, but 11 small ones that follow a similar trail through 21st century America, and if it isn't as ambitious as the three releases that preceded it, it still confirms that the Drive-By Truckers are still what they were before making this record: the best hard rock band in America today.

  • You Say...

    Write a Review

    I would like to say...

    Artist: Drive-By Truckers

    Album: A Blessing and a Curse

    Review Title: (maximum 50 characters)

    Your Review: (maximum 1,000 characters)

    Cancel

    Please keep your comments to the recordings themselves, and be courteous and respectful. Thanks! For further info, read our Community Guidelines.

“ The indie iTunes — Hardcore music fans are migrating to eMusic, the iTunes Music Store's cheaper, cooler cousin.”


Rolling Stone
Start Your Trial

© 1998-2009 eMusic.com Inc. eMusic and the eMusic logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks in the USA or other countries. All rights reserved.

All Music Guide © 1992 - 2009 All Media Guide, LLC
Portions of content provided by All Music Guide, a trademark of All Media Guide, LLC

Facebook®, YouTube, Flickr™ and Wikipedia® are registered trademarks of their respective owners, Facebook Inc., Google, Inc., Yahoo! Inc. and Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Neither Facebook Inc., Google, Inc., Yahoo! Inc. nor Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. are partners or sponsors of eMusic. eMusic uses the Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and Wikipedia API but is not endorsed or certified by Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and Wikipedia. eMusic does not pre-screen, monitor, endorse nor assume any liability for websites, contents, products, services or claims made by Facebook, YouTube, Flickr™ and Wikipedia®.

Legal or copyright question regarding Facebook, YouTube, Flickr or Wikipedia content on eMusic? Please email us.