Outsideleft: Drive-By Truckers - Poetry Flies on Chicken Wings and Rides a Mechanical Bull

Drive-By Truckers
Brighter Than Creation’s Dark
(New West)

If there is one thing people can pin down about my mercurial music tastes, it is that Drive-By Truckers are my favorite band. Other interests come and go, I take a temporary shine to some fine new thing, but my real love is true and deep. On the surface they speak to my sometimes-forced Southernness, examining that which causes a body to occasionally muse about and empathize with they who jump things in pickups. In the middle layer, they just plain rock out, unafraid to be that genius bar band every band secretly wants to be. Nobody will inspire air guitar out of me more than DBT. But when you cut through the skin of it and get to the meat of the matter, it’s because their songs are full of losers and drug addicts and blue-collar saps that can’t pay the bills and people who ain’t in love anymore all colliding in the throbbing nexus of rock ‘n’ roll. Listening to their songs, dense as Faulkner, staggering around with a beer and a hard-on, is like looking at a Jackson Pollock painting, or the stars, or moss on a grave – the deeper you look, the more you see. Their latest record, Brighter Than Creation's Dark is a fine example. Read More...