5 keepers
keeper avg .385
DBT's eighth album starts with a two-fer of Patterson Hood shit-kickers, and man, opener "Daddy Learned to Fly"***** is a doozy. Hood's opening riff sounds like a guitar being pummeled by hams, Mike Cooley powers them home with siren-y bends, and Brad Morgan's stomp beat keeps the pedal to the metal. Hood's predictably colorful narrative "The Fourth Night of My Drinking" is similarly driving, but stops several times unnecessarily, as if to look around for a compelling tune.
"Birthday Boy"****, told from a hooker/stripper's point of view, is the fist we hear from Mike Cooley. While he doesn't bring the big riffs musically he sure has a way with words.
"Got a girlfriend, don't you, boy? Nervous hands can't lie
Married men don't ask how much, Single ones ain't buying"
Cooley's "Get Downtown," which is like a snarkey "Rip This Joint" (Rolling Stones, 1972), features these chuckles:
"Jimmy, you better get yourself up off of that raggedy couch
I'm too pretty to work and I'm tired of you ugly-ing up my house.....
Get downtown, see what you can find, Put your face in someone's that ain't mine"
Nearly at the album's center the desolate ballad "You Got Another"**** unexpectedly explodes in deconstructing sonic fury. We've heard this trick on Wilco's 1996 classic "Misunderstood" but there's a big difference: the siren song of bassist Shonna Tucker, who earns writing credit with the band for the second time (her first was on the previous album "Brighter Than Creation's Dark"). Tucker's "You Got Another" and the pleasantly driving "(It's Gonna Be) I Told You So" are a welcome counterpoint to the typical rock and roll sausage-fest.
Hood fills up most of the album with some varying results. The satisfyingly crunchy "This Fucking Job"**** (like "Get Downtown") dramatizes the current economic woes' fallout on blue-collar Americans, and the brooding "The Wig He Made Her Wear" is a provocative narrative of sex and secrets. "Santa Fe" is passable country-rock, and "After the Scene Dies" rocks hard enough, shamelessly emulating Neil Young. With less success, "Drag the Lake Charlie" appears as amusing gallows humor until the idea of that line actually being said in real life starts to seem silly, and I couldn't tell you why we need death ballad "The Flying Wallendas" that closely resembles its old-timey inspiration, the 19th-century ditty "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze."
Cooley ends the album with his poignant take on fatherhood "Eyes Like Glue"****:
"I see you watching me--your eyes are just like glue, Stuck like glue to every foolish thing I say and do.... Someday you'll be a man--you'll have a big old brain
You won't need it, but you'll try to use it just the same"
With only three songs on the album, he doesn't say much but what he does is consistently worth listening to.
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