drive by truckers the unraveling

​Drive-By Truckers (from the album The Unraveling available on ATO Records)
Over the course of twelve albums, Drive-By Truckers have constructed Rock’n’Roll tales as observational opuses. DBT songs held opinions and philosophies tossed over musical Rock beds, jukebox literature that tried to untangle the duality of the south as the band balanced personal pieces of their day-to-day life with a real-time accounting of the world around them. Drive-by Truckers songwriters and co-founders Mike Cooley and Patterson Hood entered the studio for their first studio recording in three years with the guitars ready to make music though the pair found themselves with a serious lack of words to tell the stories of The Unraveling. The issue was not with their respective muse, it was the mess playing out on square(ish) screens around the globe, Patterson Hood found himself wondering ‘how do you put these day to day things we’re all living through into the form of a song that we (much less anybody else) would ever want to listen to? How do you write about the daily absurdities when you can’t even wrap your head around them in the first place? I think our response was to focus at the core emotional level. More heart and less cerebral perhaps’.
 
Taking images from various devices streaming non-stop drama, Drive-By Truckers give the unblinking masses a message that hits rather than hints, the songs of The Unraveling standing above the crowd so you can see the middle-finger of their stories pointing directly at the problem. The beat chugs as Drive-By Truckers slowly swing a hammer to in the shame we should be feeling for what we have done to the country our forefathers created by putting “Babies in Cages”. A muddy funk surrounds “Heroin Again” while The Unraveling plays a hand that shows flesh and blood losses win over “Thoughts and Prayers”. As much as Drive-By Truckers made an album with The Unraveling they are striving to make a difference with its words and music. American life plays across “21st Century USA”, the characters walking its streets familiar as friends and family while “Armageddon’s Back in Town” puts its letters on worldwide movie marquees and a pounding beat becomes payment for “Grievance Merchants”. Drive-By Truckers weave a spell when “Awaiting Resurrection” stands somewhere between the new skin of reincarnation and the rapture’s light show whispering a mantra of ‘is there an evil in this world, yes there’s an evil in this world’ while revisiting the album’s topics as exit music for The Unraveling.
 
Listen and buy the music of Drive-By Truckers from AMAZON
 
Visit the Drive-By Truckers website for more information
 

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