TRUCK OF THE LIGHT
Andy Gill hails a defining work by a rock band who are not afraid to challenge myths and highlight uncomfortable truths about their country
Drive-By Truckers, American Band
★★★★★
Download: Ramon Casiano; Guns Of Umpqua; Kinky Hypocrites; What It Means; Once They Banned Imagine; Baggage
The title affirms Drive-By Truckers’ status as one of the emblematic American bands of their era, whose Southern heritage lends an easy authority to their diverse assemblages elements of rock, soul, blues and country influences. And with American Band, they’ve reached another level, as signalled by the omission, for the first time, of a Wes Freed cartoon cover in favour of a sombre grey photo of the Stars and Stripes at half-mast.
This is their state of the union album, its songs peopled not by the usual cast of fictional barflies and lowlifes but by victims of altogether more realistic circumstances, starting with “Ramon Casiano”, a 15year-old Mexican boy who in 1931 was murdered by one Harlon Carter. Carter never faced justice: instead, he became Commander of the US Border Patrol, and subsequently headed the National Rifle Association, which he transformed from a huntsmans’ club into a powerful right-wing political lobby to help Ronald Reagan become President.
“He had the makings of a leader of a certain kind of men/Who need to feel the world’s against them, out to get them if it can,” runs one couplet, precisely skewering a prevailing contemporary American mood that overshadows many of the songs here, from the Confederate apologists of “Surrender Under Protest” (“No sooner was it over, than the memory made it nobler”) to the trigger-happy police condemned in “What It Means” (“If you say it wasn’t racial when they shot him in his tracks, well I guess that means that you ain’t black”) and “Once They Banned Imagine”, a scathing assessment of how the threat of terrorism was parlayed into a crackdown on liberty.
The half-mast flag flies not just for them, but also for soldiers squandered in futile foreign adventurism, and for victims of the pandemic of high-school shootings – here brilliantly evoked, in “Guns Of Umpqua”, by the image of a student desperately barricading a door against a shooter whilst reliving the memory of a recent idyllic rural jaunt: heaven and hell, in one mind in an Oregon classroom. Elsewhere, “Kinky Hypocrites” is a dig at corrupt televangelists, delivered in a rollicking blast of Stones-style raunch-rock, and “Baggage” a tender tribute to Robin Williams that acknowledges the widespread affliction of depression: “Only inches separate you from the darkness in me”.
While the subject matter demands some of the arrangements are more gentle and sensitive than usual, the new balance of rockers and reflections actually works to American Band’s advantage. Thoughtful, engaging and utterly contemporary, it’s one of the albums of the year.
This review appeared in yesterday’s Independent Daily Edition