'Welcome 2 Club XIII' by Drive-By Truckers
It’s not easy to turn a flinty gaze toward the past while slipping on a pair of roseate shades, but Drive-By Truckers have been making guttural and transcendent Southern-rock music for 14 albums now, so it’s not especially surprising that they stay true to their contradictions on Welcome 2 Club XIII.
The title track is a precis of the approach: an affectionately backhanded tribute to the Muscle Shoals, Alabama locale where DBT’s core singers and songwriters, Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, cut their teeth (and possibly lost some), this dirty boogie opens with a sly rhythmic hint of Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part 2” and ends not long after Hood admits, “Our glory days did kinda suck.”
After the social-distanced, societally aware twin shot of The Unraveling and The New OK in 2020, Welcome is more personal. Only one song, “Maria’s Awful Disclosures,” takes a long look at a broad subject—America’s history of paranoia—with Cooley’s gritty voice providing a measure of disgust and Revolver-style backwards guitar outlining the twisted mentality.
The other Cooley composition, “Every Single Storied Flameout,” is equally well-observed, but as advice to a troubled teenage son from a father who knows his own self-destructive failures (“If I’d been my example, I’d be worse”), it couldn’t be any more person-to-person, even with a three-piece horn section blasting the message home.
Hood’s unusual voice, a craggy, wheezing warble that expresses a startling depth of emotion, adds further individualism to this album’s bookends: “The Driver,” seven minutes of dark, largely spoken road-trip musings, and “Wilder Days,” six and a half minutes of backstreet folk and faded memories, both tracks lifted by the heartbreaking, gorgeous backing vocals of Mississippi musician Schaefer Llana.
“Wilder Days” contains a sense of the dim present versus the bright past in the line “There’s no comfort in survival, but it’s still the best option that I’ve found.” However, Welcome 2 Club XIII is evidence that Drive-By Truckers find comfort, satisfaction and, yes, glory in their survival.
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