Music review: Drive-By Truckers bring ‘The Unraveling’ to Union Transfer
The southern rock band had played Union Transfer the day after the 2016 presidential election, and their return to the venue was a deeply satisfying, rocked-out evening full of songs about what has happened in America since then.
Drive-By Truckers came to Philadelphia Thursday in support of The Unraveling, the Southern rock band’s new album that continues the righteous work of the Georgia-born group’s 2016 American Band.
American Band was recorded after Patterson Hood, who coleads the group with fellow songwriter-guitarist Mike Cooley, moved to Portland, Ore.
The shift gave them a broader perspective, and American Band took the measure of a divided land with empathetic songs addressing gun violence and racism.
The Truckers played Union Transfer the day after the 2016 presidential election, and their return to the venue was a deeply satisfying, rocked-out, 2½-hour evening full of Unraveling songs about what has happened in America since then.
That was particularly true in those written by the raspy-voiced Hood — like “Babies In Cages,” focused on the U.S.-Mexico border, or “Heroin Again,” a lament for lives lost in the opioid epidemic.
The most perceptive song might have been an emphatic rocker written by Cooley. “Grievance Merchants” is about white male resentment, impotence exploited by “merchants selling young men reclamation … selling old men back their dreams.”
The Unraveling is angry, but also musically astute. Recorded at Sam Phillips Studio in Memphis, it’s steeped in Southern culture, like everything the band has done.
Hood’s “Thoughts and Prayers” raged over ineffectual responses to gun violence. He introduced it with a shout-out to blues singer Buffalo Nichols, the show’s excellent opening act, who comes from Milwaukee, where six people died in a shooting the previous day.
The talkative Hood had choice expletives for “the powers that be who are using religion as an excuse for inaction.” And he made plain where he’d like politicians to put their thoughts and prayers.
But the song wouldn’t work as a screed. It was carried convincingly with a bounce in its step provided by bassist Matt Patton and drummer Brad Morgan, accompanying Hood’s haunting lyric: “When my children’s eyes look at me and they ask me to explain / It hurts me that I have to look away.”
Plenty went on besides The Unraveling. The Truckers hit the 90-minute limit that signals the end of most rock shows — and put the hammer down.
Patton sang the Ramones’ “The KKK Took My Baby Away.” Warren Zevon’s “Play It All Night Long” was more serious, tapping into the band’s fixation with Lynyrd Skynyrd, with a restatement of Zevon’s “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” mantra: “I’d rather feel bad than not feel anything at all.”
The 29-song set reached back to the Truckers’ 1998 Gangstabilly for “The Living Bubba." Inspired by songwriter Gregory Dean Smalley, who died of AIDS, it cuts to the essence of what drives the Truckers. “I can’t die now,” Hood sang, “‘cause I got another show to do.”
Seven songs came from Southern Rock Opera, the 2001 double album that put the band on the map. Several, including “Let There Be Rock,” celebrated the joy of music fandom, while mulling the meaning of Skynyrd.
The night ended with “Angels and Fuselage,” which also closes that album. The song turns on a profane expression for being scared out of your wits. It’s about a plane crash, and also impending adulthood. But when Hood sang it Thursday, he made it about being frightened by something bigger: the future of his country.