drive-by truckers @ the lincoln, night one, originally uploaded by minervacat.

Drive-By Truckers, The Big To-Do. Out 3/16, ATO Records.

Okay, true confession time: when I think of Brighter Than Creation’s Dark, I think of it as an album I don’t like very much. This is a bizarre fallacy of logic, because I love every single Cooley track on that album, I think “Purgatory Line” is gorgeous and adore “Home Field Advantage” live, and there are a couple of Patterson tracks I love, too. But when I think of that album, I think of it as overly long and way way way too fucking dirgey, and it is because of two songs: “Goode’s Field Road” and “You and Your Crystal Meth”. I saw the Truckers four times in 2008, and even though set lists tell me I only heard “Goode’s” twice in those four shows, I swear on all that is holy that I lost about six hours of my life to that fucking song that year.

You know what the worst part is, too? The version of “Goode’s” that’s on The Fine Print is amazing; it’s an incredible song, the song itself. The version on Brighter Than? I would sooner chew my own arm off than listen to that version ever again.

So while my iTunes ratings tell me that I was pretty damn wild about Brighter Than, my brain doesn’t think so, and so my brain was excited but wary about The Big To-Do.

All that said: shit, y’all, this album is fucking fantastic. It’s a spectacularly raw and dirty sound, but all the songs are performed impeccably. It rocks hard, and it moves, even when they slow the song-pace down — there’s only a couple of tracks that clock in over 5 minutes and the album doesn’t bog down in them like it could. Neff’s pedal steel is utilized gorgeously, and the great keyboard work from Jay Gonzalez that gets lost in the sheer force of their live show is audible and lovely on the album. (The ragtime break in “Get Downtown” in particular, and the whole gorgeous acoustic-steel-piano arrangement of “Eyes Like Glue” just blows me out of the water.)

In the notes on the Truckers’ official web discography, for A Blessing And A Curse, Patterson says, I always loved Big Star and The Replacements and side one is sort of our attempt at making that kind of record. (With a little Faces and Blue Oyster Cult thrown in for good measure). I’ve always found that statement fascinating — and I can hear it in that album, in parts — particularly because I really love ABAAC and I know that’s an unpopular opinion, but also when I listened to Big To-Do for the first time, driving home from High Point at 1 am with the windows down and the volume up, my immediate thought was, Wow. The Truckers made the album that ABAAC wanted to be and didn’t achieve.

In many ways, this album feels similar to some things that I wrote about Mike Doughty’s 2009 Sad Man Happy Man; it’s an album that pulls together a lot of things that the Truckers have done before, but not necessarily done together before this, primarily a fusion of song topic and sound. “Drag The Lake Charlie” and “The Wig He Made Her Wear” have that deeply creepy gothic feeling of some of Patterson’s earliest songs, like “Margo & Harold” or “Sink Hole”, and of course “This Fucking Job” is straight-up anthemic guitar-rock Patterson rage-against-the-Man. “You Got Another” has the lyrical sweeping heartbreak of “The Purgatory Line”, even outdoes that song to a great extent, but the lyrics may get lost in the soaring melody of the song (they shouldn’t, but they might, because people are stupid). Cooley’s three songs are about, in order, a stripper and feeling trapped in a life that isn’t quite yours; a dead-end marriage that still has some love in it; and advice from a parent on how to escape and how to try to be happy, all topics he’s touched before. But they’re all a little more grown-up, a little older and wiser and sadder and more content than they might have been, if they were written ten years ago; and they all rock the shit out.

It isn’t a predictable album, especially in sequencing, but I find it a comfortable one (and the sequencing works for me, both on CD and re-sequenced for vinyl), in the best way — it’s full of songs that feel familiar while not being retread ground. I think that it’s some of Cooley and Shonna’s best songwriting, and while not all of Patterson’s songs work fully for me (“Santa Fe” feels like a song that Patterson should have killed, but somehow it falls short for me, though even after a dozen listens I couldn’t tell you why), all of Patterson’s songs never work for me, historically; there’s always something on a Truckers album that Patterson wrote that I kind of can’t stand. (Sorry, Patterson.)

I have spent a lot of time with this album in the last month; a lot of time. Listening to it, thinking about it, thinking about how the band got to making it, thinking about the writing and the sequencing and the production of it. And after all that thinking, I still believe that it’s a great album. It will be the album I use to introduce the band to new fans, because it’s straight-up a pure Truckers album, without having to explain line-up changes or “concept album about Skynyrd” or “first album after Jason, last new-material album for New West” or any of that. This is a Drive-By Truckers record; not a Drive-By Truckers record with a caveat, which as much as I adore their entire back catalog, a lot of the albums that preceded this one are.

I know there are people out there who were disappointed by this album; who thought it was phoned in or less than inspiring, and I’m just not sure what album those people are listening to. The Truckers have never hung their hat on making the same album over and over again — okay, no offense because it’s among my favorite of their releases, but one Southern Rock Opera is, in fact, enough — and this album takes a great step towards shaking off the occasionally unfortunate “Southern” mantle that I know dogs the shit out of Patterson if not the rest of the band: this is a pure goddamned rock and roll album, written and recorded by a whole mess of supremely talented musicians, and it’s tight, sharp, and doesn’t waste a note.

Like I said, there are plenty of people out there who will dislike this album, because it isn’t the album they wanted the Truckers to make; I didn’t have any expectations, beyond “please don’t let them fuck up ‘After The Scene Dies'”. I wanted a new Truckers album, I got one, and I didn’t start out prepared to love it unconditionally, but it turns out I do.

So. For whatever that’s worth.