Post by Zapp Brannigan on Feb 17, 2011 10:55:34 GMT -5
www.lifessweetbreath.com/reviews/albums/34-go-go-boots.html
Drive-By Truckers - Go-Go Boots
[ATO]
88%
A case can certainly be made that Drive-By Truckers are one of the most underrated bands of our generation, simply by virtue of their staggering consistency. Now thirteen years and nine albums into their career, they’ve yet to release a single album that represents a step back for the band—hell, their albums rarely even contain a bad song. And in their fifteen years as a band, they’ve toured virtually nonstop, allowing them to gradually, but noticeably, gel over the years, becoming tighter and tighter as a unit with every new release. Somehow, though, they’ve never received their proper due. There seems to be a perception that the band is merely a novelty, serving to fill a niche for unapologetic, take-no-prisoners, blue-collar rawk with aw-shucks accents. Well, Go-Go Boots isn’t going to do a thing to change those naïve misconceptions, but anyone that can put aside whatever ideological or geological differences they think might exist between themselves and the Truckers will find their greatest collection of songs since 2004’s brilliant The Dirty South.
The most immediately striking thing about Boots is how many new elements the Truckers have incorporated into their compositions. Last year’s The Big To-Do hinted that the Truckers may be starting to cool their sound off, turning the gain down in favor of finding new ways to get across their musical ideas, and Boots continues that process. It’s not a radical shift—and the Truckers have by no means sobered up, so to speak—but a subtle, sensible transition that provides some added depth to their studio recordings. Their general sound is still the same (and always will be), but, for instance, the clinky pianos that peek in throughout the album simply sound brighter behind the more restrained guitars. As opposed to using meaty riffs as exclamation points to their songs as they’ve done in the past, they let these songs breathe more and find more room for pianos, Wurlitzers, banjos, richer backup vocals, and more lyrical pedal steel guitars.
Both approaches work, but this newly fine-tuned approach may lead to interesting new directions for the Truckers. For instance, on Shonna Tucker-sung tunes “Dancin’ Ricky” and “Where’s Eddie,” the more controlled, diverse instrumentation leads to a clearer synthesis of the Truckers’ homegrown soul influences (which have always been there) into their traditional rock. “Eddie”—one of the album’s two Eddie Hinton covers—is one of the absolute highlights of the album and quite possibly one of the best songs the Truckers have ever put to record, even if they didn’t write it. The first minute is a slow, funky burn, with the band showing the aforementioned discipline in keeping Tucker’s downright gorgeous voice afloat until it blasts off into a wonderfully anthemic hook. They then punctuate the hook with a virtuosic explosion of timelessly bouncy organs and crisp drumming that wouldn’t sound at all out of place on an Curtis Mayfield record. The entire hook simply sounds like a hard-won, well-deserved, celebratory moment of exhaled release for the band.
And then, of course, there’s the consistently impressive songwriting of principal songwriters Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, which doesn’t suffer one bit from the slightly tweaked sound. Hood even goes for a more long-form songwriting style on “Used To Be A Cop,” which is heavily influenced by Bob Dylan’s song-story “The Hurricane,” and “The Fireplace Poker,” both of which boast running times in excess of seven minutes. It’s likely that Hood and Cooley don’t even know how to rest on their laurels as both continue to churn out and build upon their confidently told tales of righteous sinners, unfaithful spouses, indulgent holy men, violent and generally disinterested cops, and handshakes that affect hard-working men miles away. Over the life of their band, Cooley and Hood have together created an intricate web of a whole county’s worth of conflicted and drunken characters, something that arguably no other band in America has done as consistently well as Hood, Cooley, and the rest of the Truckers. It’s a county worth visiting and revisiting—if you’re open-minded enough not to ignorantly and flippantly dismiss the natives just because of their accents.
-Kyle A. Rosko, February 16, 2011
Drive-By Truckers - Go-Go Boots
[ATO]
88%
A case can certainly be made that Drive-By Truckers are one of the most underrated bands of our generation, simply by virtue of their staggering consistency. Now thirteen years and nine albums into their career, they’ve yet to release a single album that represents a step back for the band—hell, their albums rarely even contain a bad song. And in their fifteen years as a band, they’ve toured virtually nonstop, allowing them to gradually, but noticeably, gel over the years, becoming tighter and tighter as a unit with every new release. Somehow, though, they’ve never received their proper due. There seems to be a perception that the band is merely a novelty, serving to fill a niche for unapologetic, take-no-prisoners, blue-collar rawk with aw-shucks accents. Well, Go-Go Boots isn’t going to do a thing to change those naïve misconceptions, but anyone that can put aside whatever ideological or geological differences they think might exist between themselves and the Truckers will find their greatest collection of songs since 2004’s brilliant The Dirty South.
The most immediately striking thing about Boots is how many new elements the Truckers have incorporated into their compositions. Last year’s The Big To-Do hinted that the Truckers may be starting to cool their sound off, turning the gain down in favor of finding new ways to get across their musical ideas, and Boots continues that process. It’s not a radical shift—and the Truckers have by no means sobered up, so to speak—but a subtle, sensible transition that provides some added depth to their studio recordings. Their general sound is still the same (and always will be), but, for instance, the clinky pianos that peek in throughout the album simply sound brighter behind the more restrained guitars. As opposed to using meaty riffs as exclamation points to their songs as they’ve done in the past, they let these songs breathe more and find more room for pianos, Wurlitzers, banjos, richer backup vocals, and more lyrical pedal steel guitars.
Both approaches work, but this newly fine-tuned approach may lead to interesting new directions for the Truckers. For instance, on Shonna Tucker-sung tunes “Dancin’ Ricky” and “Where’s Eddie,” the more controlled, diverse instrumentation leads to a clearer synthesis of the Truckers’ homegrown soul influences (which have always been there) into their traditional rock. “Eddie”—one of the album’s two Eddie Hinton covers—is one of the absolute highlights of the album and quite possibly one of the best songs the Truckers have ever put to record, even if they didn’t write it. The first minute is a slow, funky burn, with the band showing the aforementioned discipline in keeping Tucker’s downright gorgeous voice afloat until it blasts off into a wonderfully anthemic hook. They then punctuate the hook with a virtuosic explosion of timelessly bouncy organs and crisp drumming that wouldn’t sound at all out of place on an Curtis Mayfield record. The entire hook simply sounds like a hard-won, well-deserved, celebratory moment of exhaled release for the band.
And then, of course, there’s the consistently impressive songwriting of principal songwriters Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, which doesn’t suffer one bit from the slightly tweaked sound. Hood even goes for a more long-form songwriting style on “Used To Be A Cop,” which is heavily influenced by Bob Dylan’s song-story “The Hurricane,” and “The Fireplace Poker,” both of which boast running times in excess of seven minutes. It’s likely that Hood and Cooley don’t even know how to rest on their laurels as both continue to churn out and build upon their confidently told tales of righteous sinners, unfaithful spouses, indulgent holy men, violent and generally disinterested cops, and handshakes that affect hard-working men miles away. Over the life of their band, Cooley and Hood have together created an intricate web of a whole county’s worth of conflicted and drunken characters, something that arguably no other band in America has done as consistently well as Hood, Cooley, and the rest of the Truckers. It’s a county worth visiting and revisiting—if you’re open-minded enough not to ignorantly and flippantly dismiss the natives just because of their accents.
-Kyle A. Rosko, February 16, 2011
and anyone who would even think about passing them up because of their accents doesn't deserve to be graced with their musical presence, anyway 
