"GREAT TO BE ALIVE": Drive-By Truckers still believe it
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According to the liner notes, these hard-living Southern rockers recorded most of their seventh album “within hours” of writing it in the studio. That could be taken as a casual boast that they’re on a historical roll — their hard-dying precursors, Lynyrd Skynyrd, never made it past album six, and these 11 tracks are as accomplished and impassioned as any helping by either band. Then again, they may just be trying to elude the curse of fate that was obsessing Patterson Hood and company long before they located their muse in Skynyrd’s doom with 2001’s Southern Rock Opera. The title track is about a confused trust-fund musician; it also describes the Truckers’ own bitterly won position in life. Other songs abjure the first-person stories about rural life that made Southern Rock Opera and its two successors so stunning for simpler tales of dissolution-to-death in the “Aftermath U.S.A.,” starting with “flowers flyin’ across the room” on “Feb 14” and ending with a “A World of Hurt.” Producer Mitch Easter deserves credit for helping the band avoid the material’s intrinsic sentimental pitfalls with their sweetest, sharpest sound yet; Hood deserves credit for still believing in his closing line: “It’s great to be alive.”
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