Like many artists residing in Donald Trump’s America, Drive-By Truckers spent 4 years offended, defiant and vocal about their distaste for the near-despotic rule of the previous U.S. president. Two swiftly assembled albums – The Unraveling and The New OK, each launched in 2020 – had been essentially the most political from a band that is made a profession of balancing social commentary with private expertise. (Their 2001 breakthrough LP Southern Rock Opera explored the Athens, Ga., group’s Southern musical roots whereas delving into deeper racial problems with the area.)
With Trump and a pandemic largely within the rearview for now, they get right down to the enterprise of taking inventory of their collective previous on Welcome 2 Membership XIII, their 14th album of contemporary Southern rock. And if not an entire lot has modified within the Truckers’ guitar-centric strategy to their Skynyrd-by-way-of-the-Replacements songs, the 9 cuts right here chart the expansion of a band that performed in golf equipment for sometimes hostile audiences as they developed into among the best dwell acts on the earth.
As on the Drive-By Truckers’ terrific trilogy about rising up under the Mason-Dixon line – Southern Rock Opera, Ornament Day (2003) and The Soiled South (2004) – Welcome 2 Membership XIII is a unfastened idea album, this time wanting again on the years earlier than their id was totally shaped. “Tonight we’re gonna be entertained by our favourite Foghat cowl band,” Patterson Hood sings on the title observe, recalling their indifferently obtained opening gigs as Adam’s Home Cat, who get a name-check right here.
Their seven-minute opener “The Driver” units the tone as Hood opens an early tour diary full of late nights, new cities and youthful optimism. But it surely’s not all the time fond reminiscences: There are Klan sightings and dangerous icy roads alongside the way in which, and, medicine and booze take their toll in “We Will By no means Wake You Up within the Morning,” a tribute to a late good friend. “Wilder Days,” the album’s six-and-a-half-minute closing tune, drops the Drive-By Truckers within the current day whereas tracing the road from earlier than there have been households to assist – “we had been invincible and unafraid” – to the life that now retains them on the street for months on finish: “The times are getting shorter and the years counting down, and the solar will get dizzy watching us as we go spinning round.”
Recorded shortly and with little fuss, Welcome 2 Membership XIII sounds uncooked and weary, as if the previous couple of years aren’t the one factor that is weighed on the band; the a long time have, too. When the Drive-By Truckers spring to life – the throwback “Shake and Pine,” Mike Cooley’s horn-abetted “Each Single Storied Flameout” – it is a short-term salve. However they by no means sound defeated. “Have a seat and keep awhile,” invitations Hood in “Cast in Hell and Heaven Despatched.” They’re nonetheless in for the lengthy haul.
Drive-By Truckers Albums Ranked
Their path to turning into among the best rock bands of the brand new century was paved the old style means: although tons and many touring.
