Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams by Patterson Hood
With the Southern-rock band Drive-By Truckers undergoing considerable interior reassessment—on record with 2022’s Welcome 2 Club XIII and on tour with last year’s revisitation of the 2001 double-disc Southern Rock Opera—co-founder Patterson Hood is clearly in a pondering mood.
For Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams, his first new solo LP since 2012, Hood turns much of his gaze back and inward. Almost entirely without the electric guitars (doubled or tripled) of his regular gig, his inimitable hoarse voice fills the relative silence with childlike wonder darkened by the observations of age.
Wonder and darkness come through in DBT ballads, as well, but producer Chris Funk coaxes them into differently shaded facets not far removed from Funk’s own folk-music contributions to the Decemberists.
Encouraged, Hood composes more on piano: “Exploding Trees” opens the album as plinked notes drip like melting icicles amid a tale of a difficult winter night; “Last Hope” locates the bleak side of Ben Folds within classic Western-movie dramedy; and poignant chording leaves space for other players to beautify the grimness of “The Pool House.”
Those other players across the album include Los Lobos member Steve Berlin, whose saxophone and flute add grit and gilt, former Brandi Carlile sidewoman Kyleen King, with elegant strings, and the North Carolina band Wednesday, which brings dirty rock ‘n’ roll to “The Van Pelt Parties.”
Hood’s vocal accompanists hit hardest, though. Waxahatchee, a.k.a. Katie Crutchfield, is the sweet secret love in the chiming story of “The Forks of Cypress,” while Lydia Loveless, in the noirish Americana of “A Werewolf and a Girl,” is seductively terrifying as a woman who seems to feel nothing and needs to feel anything.
The stylistic twists make this solo album almost as distinct from Hood’s DBT work as Pete Townshend’s Empty Glass was from the Who. As the man approaches his 61st birthday, Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams ponders every year of experience as fuel for his creative furnace.
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