Drive-By Truckers -Go-Go-Boots

Mon 20th Jun, 2011 in Music Reviews

Go-Go Boots is the eleventh release from Alabama’s finest The Drive-By Truckers. This is yet another collection of songs about characters on the fringe or some that have already dropped off the edge. Some of you may think that Mike Cooley and Patterson Hood have been mining this same vein since they commenced with this band and you would be correct. No matter how far they dig, the quality is still here within these tracks.

Cooley can still write those fabulous, not quite clichéd, country songs and sing in a voice that was built solely for that style. Pulaski, from the record, is a case in point, which tells the tale of a woman trying to escape from her life in Tennessee by heading west. This is not a new story, we have heard it before, but the telling of the tale is the prize.

Hood brings quite a few dark moods to this recording. This is a record of murder ballads and slower tunes with very little room for the DBT’s to rock out. The darkness of the souls who inhabit these tales makes this interesting listening. From the Vietnam Vet living with his demons in Ray’s Automatic Weapon or the lost soul hanging on by a thread in Used To Be A Cop (with shades of a Hold Steady sound) you sense that things down there below the Mason-Dixon line are not a mirror image of that long lost American Dream. With guitar work that keeps you on edge and a certain feeling of pain throughout, you get no sense that there is a light at the end of the tunnel for many of these souls.

Musically, the Trucker’s are as tight as ever. John Neff, Hood and Cooley bring a trio of guitars and slide that illustrate this wrong side of the tracks landscape. Shona Tucker adds a couple of songs and sings lead on Where’s Eddie, one of the two songs written by that talented (but troubled) musician the late Eddie Hinton. This is not a bleak record, but it is one filled with some stories that make you happy for the life you lead.

Patterson Hood’s The Thanksgiving Filter is an ode to the pain that some of us feel when we need to get together with family we don’t really have much in common with. Assholes is a kiss off either to a manager or a record company or ex-band member, but whomever, it is definitely pointed and sharp. Patterson has lost nothing through the years and his song writing is still beautifully descriptive.