"The Unraveling," the twelfth studio album from Drive-By Truckers, is not a party record. You don't really need to play it to figure that out; all you have to do is read some of the song titles: "Armageddon's Back in Town," "Heroin Again," "Babies in Cages," "Awaiting Resurrection." None of those titles bring to mind a bunch of hoopin' and hollerin', beer or two in hand, while dancing on the top of a table all night.
The song titles are not false advertising, as evidenced by a sampling of these lyrics from "Heroin Again":
Insinuate a fever dream
Instigate a requiem
A deafening explosion of shame
An orgasm inside your brain
Silly young men
Why you using heroin
Thought you knew better than that
Or these, from "Babies in Cages":
And are we so divided
That we can't at least agree
This ain't the country that
Our granddads fought for us to be?
Babies in cages
"The Unraveling" is hardly DBT's first foray into the realm of the political. For more than two decades, Patterson Hood has been exploring the contradictions he encountered during the course of his days growing up and becoming an adult in Alabama - a phenomenon he's often called "the duality of the Southern thing." The difference is that in the band's earlier days, a song like "The Three Great Alabama Icons" (one of whom was George Wallace) might be bracketed by obvious party anthems like "Dead, Drunk & Naked" and "Let There Be Rock," and a song like "Two Daughters and a Beautiful Wife" (about the murder of Bryan Harvey and his family) would be immediately followed by "3 Dimes Down," possibly the greatest party song that Mike Cooley ever wrote (and I'll let you look up what that one is all about). Even the band's 2016 "American Band," which delved more deeply into current day politics than any previous DBT record, feels light as air in comparison to the new record.
The album's centerpiece, and the song that will be talked about the most, is "Thoughts and Prayers." In this era of mass shootings in common public gathering areas, those simple words have taken on a much different meaning. Rather than a sincere (if ultimately inadequate) expression of sympathy and sorrow, they're now viewed by many as a symbol of a generation's inability (or lack of will) to take any meaningful action to stop something that everyone agrees is a horrible societal development. Patterson Hood leaves no doubt as to which side of the argument he is on:
When my children's eyes look at me and they ask me to explain
It hurts me that I have to look away
The powers that be are in for shame and comeuppance
When Generation Lockdown has their day
They'll throw the bums all out and drain the swamp for real
Perp walk then down the Capitol steps and show them how it feels
Tramp the dirt down, Jesus, you can pray the rod they'll spare
Stick it up your ass with your useless thoughts and prayers
It's one thing for an individual to make a statement like this. But when an artist whose livelihood depends in large part on the support of a demographic which quite likely (and accurately) will take this song as an affront to the very existence of that demographic, that's something very different. There's a lot at stake for a band to be writing and playing songs like this, and while DBT never has (and never likely will) reach the heights of popularity of a group like the Dixie Chicks, we all saw what happened to them when a certain line was crossed. Even a group as popular as they were at the time saw their audience change dramatically, pre- and post-comments about George W. Bush.
The album's sound matches its material. Having gone through numerous personnel changes over the years, since 2014 DBT's sonic approach has been focused primarily on a guitar-pronged attack (sometimes two, and sometimes three, when sometimes keyboardist Jay Gonzalez picks up his ax). That's true here as well, but there's also the added element of the sound mix, which feels constricted throughout, and almost claustrophobic - another signal that "The Unraveling" is a very different record than those which preceded it.
"The Unraveling" is relentless and unforgiving. Might it have benefited from a bit of lightness, amidst all the darkness? Perhaps. But there's no questioning that "The Unraveling" is Drive-By Truckers' bravest album.
