NEW: Sample tracks added!
About 6 years ago, I was sitting with friends in our usual Friday-night watering hole. Usually, most of us rarely ventured anywhere but home after drinks, but this time, a plan was hatched to head to The Bishop’s Collar –- a bar near the Philadelphia Art Museum at that time attempting to make itself the destination spot for alt-country bands. A band we’d heard of, but not seen, called The Drive-By Truckers was playing that night, and if the local alt-weekly rag’s words were worth believing, this bunch would provide some lean, mean trucker-rock -– perfect drinking music.
A cab-drive and pizza-joint-stop later, a bunch of us were crowded into The Bishop’s Collar’s narrow space, not exactly an optimum area for a show. Not too much later, we were ready to go home. We had expected something tough, rowdy and Skynyrd-like. In truth, The Drive-By Truckers seemed like callow, if well-meaning youths.
Several years later, I was back at The Bishop’s Collar with a friend from out of town. The Collar’s days as a live venue had been in the past tense for some time. Said friend shared with me an affinity for some lynchpins of alt-country: Gram Parsons, Wilco, Old 97’s. I mentioned that I had seen The Drive-By Truckers here and how mediocre I found them, and my friend was enthused to find someone who shared his underwhelmed emotions regarding this band. Apparently, a coworker had long tried hard to convince him of the band’s merits, to little avail.
And so, I wryly smiled when I received my assigned Hear Factor CD. Who knew? I don’t think I ever expressed my flatlined reaction to this band on RTH. Listening to the CD, my feelings are more or less confirmed. Granted, The Drive-By Truckers aren’t receiving truckloads of plaudits, but I always felt like the press overrated this second- or third-tier band. Occasionally, you hear something about live prowess or literary and/or conceptual ambitions, but I’ve yet to see or hear concrete evidence.
Apart from some occasional tasty slide-guitar playing (see – better yet, hear “Where the Devil Don’t Stay”), there’s little here to distinguished this from other alt-country bands. Maybe it’s my Jeff Tweedy bias, but there’s a lot here I’ve heard before from Uncle Tupelo. It sounds like The Drive-By Truckers also have two lead singers: one to do the Jay Farrar-style stern-faced ruminations on hard livin’ (“Women Without Whiskey”) and another to handle Tweedy-esque sweet love songs (“My Sweet Annette”).
If I understand the Hear Factor concept correctly, I am supposed to get a sense of living inside someone else’s musical world, or at least part of it. [Ed. – Hey, someone gets it!] I’m not sure who made this mix, though I have a culprit in mind. But this mix confirms that I cannot conceive one would want listen to nothing but certain genres. And alternative-country is one of these genres; others include techno, death-metal, and lo-fi indie rock. All these styles tend to the monochromatic to my ears – a lot of alt-county reminds me of that dusty, ill-flavored coffee you get on Amtrak trains. Mind you, I’m not suggesting the maker of this mix listens only to Amtrak-coffee alt-country.
But I generally need a palette-cleanser after even the best of this genre, perhaps The Beach Boys, John Coltrane, or Blur – something big, ambitious, and filled with colors. It probably says something that my favorite track on this disc is “Goddamn Lonely Love” which has this pretty chord – I’m gonna guess it’s diminished or something, anyway it’s sounds like a Beatles chord to me. What can I say? I need chords like that.
