| Product Summary | | Label: New West Records | | UPC: 00607396608928 | | Release Date: 4/18/2006 | | Buy.com Sku: 202426362 | | Item#: M2VXVC | Format:  CD |
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| The Drive-By Truckers are purveyors of a new kind of southern rock storytelling - dense, dark, majestic and intelligent. Featuring three absolute ace songwriters, their albums are stronger for the natural competition. One of the hardest working live bands in the business today, DBT's performances are epic and cathartic. This 7th album is their most concise to date. While in keeping with their now recognizable sound, they have made some significant changes: the songs were all freshly written with this record in mind and without a specific theme. The result is very thought out and deliberate with a decided air of sophistication (Truckers style!).
"...finds its own cozy place somewhere between Lynyrd Skynyrd and Leonard Cohen." E! Online
"Cement[s] the Truckers' status as one of the best rock 'n' roll bands going." Magnet
| | Album Notes and Credits |
Notes & Personnel Info |  | Drive-By Truckers: Brad Morgan, Jason Isbell, Shonna Tucker, Patterson Hood, Mike Cooley. | | Personnel: Jason Isbell (guitar, E-bow, Wurlitzer organ); David Barbe (guitar, piano); Mike Cooley (guitar). | | Audio Mixers: David Barbe; John Agnello. | | Photographer: Danny Clinch. | | The Drive-By Truckers have been widely acclaimed for their Southern-bred, salt-of-the-earth roots rock, and rightly so. With their gritty approach, memorable songs, and simultaneously wry and reverential take on the South, the band is something of a Lynyrd Skynyrd for the indie-rock set. | | The band's 2006 release, A BLESSING AND A CURSE, is one of their most focused and streamlined recordings, paring the fat for an 11-track set that has the Truckers doing what they do best. Whether on Stones-influenced jams ("Aftermath USA"), drowsy Neil Young-like numbers ("Goodbye"), or mesmerizing minor-chord rockers that recall '80s college radio ("Easy on Yourself"), the Truckers don't hide their influences. Yet they also work those influences into a classic rock aesthetic that is as well-crafted as it is enjoyable. |
Producer: David Barbe; David Barbe |
Engineer: David Barbe |
| | Compilation Appearances |
| | Technical Info | | Release Date : 04/18/2006 | | Original Release Date : 2006 | | Catalog ID : 6089 | | Label : New West Records, Inc. | | Number of Discs : 1 | | Studio/Live : Studio | | Mono/Stereo : Stereo | | SPAR Code : n/a | | UPC : 00607396608928 |
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| | Professional Reviews | | Rolling Stone (p.100)
- 3.5 stars out of 5 -- "[An] engaging variation on old-school Southern rock. Amid ragged riffs, light honky-tonk and elegant slow stuff, the Truckers turn in tuneful, finely wrought story-songs."Entertainment Weekly (p.75)
- "[A] CD that finds the Southern rockers turning from the social concerns of 2004's DIRTY SOUTH to the more personal with career-best results." -- Grade: A- Uncut (p.112)
- 4 stars out of 5 -- "[A] more personal and introspective record than usual....Truly there's still a lot to marvel at, especially the album's musical diversity..." Magnet (p.93)
- "A BLESSING AND A CURSE still exudes a distinctly Southern twang, but it also finds the Truckers embracing their inner Big Star." Mojo (Publisher)
(p.p.94)
- 4 stars out of 5 -- "[W]hat distinguishes them from other bands...is their sincerity, and the unselfconscious honesty that brings to their blistering three-guitar rock and ballads." PopMatters 8 of 10
If the Truckers succeed on this kind of visceral level, as they have made a habit of doing for a few albums now, they do so through gritted teeth. It's a product of compromise: "Feb. 14", and the entirety of A Blessing and a Curse, is an attempt to reconcile what was hoped to be with what is - in other words, preconceptions taken for granted are blighted by reality. This time around, there's a concerted effort to get the heart of the matter with efficiency and clarity: unlike longwinded previous albums The Dirty South and the two-disc Southern Rock Opera, A Blessing and a Curse clocks in at a remarkably clean 45 minutes. For the Truckers (fueled, as always, by the three guitars and three pens of Hood, Mike Cooley, and Jason Isbell), it's an abnormally concise record that also happens to be their least sloppy. - Zeth Lundy
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| | Bio | | | The Drive-By Truckers You hear about "the greatest band in the world" being dropped on many a group, desperately given this medal in hopes they'll use it to "save rock-n-roll," whatever that means. But no band that has had to suffer under this artificial responsibility has succeeded so triumphantly as Drive-By Truckers. Equal parts back porch historians, runaway drunken firecrackers, and poets of the hard life and how to live it; they came on the scene and set the bar higher for what you can do with the music we love. The characters in their songs have left gals at the altar, wrecked their cars, woken up on the cold floor and even killed themselves a number of times over the years, breathing some new intelligent life, not just into rock music but, into rockers everywhere. Many a critic, including myself, have placed upon them the treacherous mantle of being The Best Rock Band In The World, and they wear this title like the blessing and the curse it is...I love this band. DBT's 7th album, A Blessing and a Curse, takes in all the elements that make them great and condenses them into the tightest, hardest rocking set of songs they've yet to produce. Their influences in the past have been immortalized in song, but here we see them integrated into the songs. The opening track "Feb 14" sounds like the best, most poetic song the Replacements never released and Cooley's devastatingly great rocker "Gravity's Gone" does the same thing with a Creedence Clearwater Revival backwoods twang. Isbell chimes in with "Easy on Yourself" a subtler yet more biting warning fable in the vein of 2003's "Outfit." And just when you think that these former class clowns have moved on to the honor society, they kick in with the hilarious "Aftermath USA" - as good a train-wreck, surmise-the-damage classic as anything from Waylon or Merle.
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