Album Review: A Blessing And A Curse by Drive-By Truckers

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.

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