Drive-By Truckers Discography
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 Drive-By TruckersBlessing and a Curse Release Date 2006 04 18 Label New West Rating:  2001's Southern Rock Opera catapulted the Drive-By Truckers from their early status as another alt-country band with a joke name into one of the smartest, edgiest, and most talked-about hard rock bands in America, and since then they seem to have taken the thematic consensus of Southern Rock Opera as a lucky piece -- while 2003's Decoration Day and 2004's The Dirty South weren't concept albums like SRO, their tales of hard living and difficult circumstances in the American South gave them a unified feeling that turned the band's fine songs into an even more cohesive whole. With A Blessing and a Curse, the Truckers take a step back from this approach for the first time since their breakthrough -- most of the album's 11 songs were written in the studio during the recording sessions -- and though the sound and the feel of these tunes is consistent with the band's previous body of work, A Blessing and a Curse sounds like a collection of individual pieces rather than a coherent and organic whole. But the pieces sound great -- Patterson Hood, Mike Cooley, and Jason Isbell remain a triple-threat team as guitarists, songwriters, and singers, and the tough, funky report of Brad Morgan's drums and Shonna Tucker's bass drives this music with both groove and force. The hard-earned wisdom about matters of the heart related on &"Space City," &"A World of Hurt," and &"Feb. 14" cuts deep down to the bone, as does the day-to-day emotional chaos of &"Aftermath U.S.A." and the title cut. The Drive-By Truckers have never sounded better in the studio as they do on &"A World of Hurt," Without polishing away their personality, producer David Barbe and mixer John Agnello get the band's three-guitar onslaught on tape with equal shares of muscle and clarity, while the tight interplay between the players suggests the Rolling Stones at their Sticky Fingers/Exile on Main St. peak as much as the DBTs' oft-cited role models Lynyrd Skynyrd. A Blessing and a Curse doesn't try to tell one big story, but 11 small ones that follow a similar trail through 21st century America, and if it isn't as ambitious as the three releases that preceded it, it still confirms that the Drive-By Truckers are still what they were before making this record: the best hard rock band in America today. Mark Deming, Rovi |
Tracks:
| Title | Composer | Time | |
| 1 | Feb 14 | Hood, Drive-By Truckers | 3:40 |
| 2 | Gravity's Gone | Cooley, Drive-By Truckers | 3:33 |
| 3 | Easy on Yourself | Isbell | 3:28 |
| 4 | Aftermath USA | Barbe, Drive-By Truckers | 3:16 |
| 5 | Goodbye | Drive-By Truckers, Hood | 6:11 |
| 6 | Daylight | Isbell | 3:35 |
| 7 | Wednesday | Drive-By Truckers, Hood | 4:04 |
| 8 | Little Bonnie | Drive-By Truckers, Hood | 3:56 |
| 9 | Space City | Cooley, Drive-By Truckers | 4:48 |
| 10 | Blessing and a Curse | Hood, Drive-By Truckers | 5:31 |
| 11 | World of Hurt | Hood, Drive-By Truckers | 4:52 |
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