By Erik Adams
For The State News
Drive-By Truckers certainly picked a good title to represent its latest album.
The songs on "A Blessing and A Curse" are a mix of raucous anthems for the night of and regretful ballads for the morning after. The Truckers weave the tales of a hardscrabble, distinctly south-of-the-Mason-Dixon existence, a lifestyle that's good, bad and mostly ugly.
Giving voice to the album's cast of sad-sacks, hopeless romantics and redeemed lowlifes are the band's three singers/guitarists/songwriters, Patterson Hood, Mike Cooley and Jason Isbell. At the risk of being overly metaphorical, the three frontmen form a Stetson-clad, fret-burning, darkly humorous hydra that sings in a pack-a-day drawl and isn't aware that a southern man don't need Neil Young around. Fortunately, the steady rhythm section of bassist Shonna Tucker and drummer Brad Morgan contains the beast before it devours all it has created.
"Easy on Yourself" is a song bucking for a fight, but its struggle is ultimately internal. "Calling out to everyone who tried to run/You tried to run," the narrator is reminded.
The protagonist of "Aftermath USA" comes to his revelation in the wake of a bender that may or may not have been induced by one of the Rolling Stones' honky tonk women.
As he surveys the wreckage, the cowbell in the song's refrain stands in for an alarm clock.
There's wreckage in the album's slower tracks as well, but it's more difficult to recover from. "If I could have one wish right now/I'd be about as half as tough as I pretend I am," Cooley sings at the beginning of "Space City," the tune with the heaviest heart. The song finds Cooley and his guitar-slinging compatriots trading their electric riffs for delicate acoustic picking, a reverent accompaniment to its mournful tone.
The title track almost gets lost in its own anguish before the wiser "A World of Hurt" puts things in perspective. In its spoken-word verses, "A World of Hurt" discusses an old friend's advice that "to love is to feel pain," an attitude that is the album's overlying theme.
It's the most cliché of clichés, but the Truckers possess a sincerity that manages to sell it.
"A Blessing and A Curse" is kept from being a truly great start-to-finish album by its middle act. "Goodbye" lingers too long, while, in spite of its soaring chorus, it's easy to let "Daylight" pass you by.
The rollicking "Wednesday" has the album's funniest lyric — involving a twist on the phrase "a man's home should be his palace" and an unprintable reference to feline fecal matter — but given the company the song keeps, it might be ignored.
"A Blessing and A Curse" is a near-great parable about embracing life's positives and negatives — in this respect, it's a distant country cousin of The Flaming Lips' recent "At War With the Mystics."
It would be nice to think that the album's characters take something from the Truckers' lessons.
But if they don't, their continued misadventures might make for another good album.
