Review Summary: There's no comfort in survival
That
Welcome 2 Club XIII seems to mark the beginning of something like the fifth era for Drive-By Truckers in over 25 years since the group’s inception is a testament to their status as survivors. Fittingly, this status is exactly the concept which the record aims to examine and deconstruct. The band’s 14th proper studio album follows 2020’s
The Unravelling and
The New OK, which together with 2016’s
American Band formed a trilogy of overtly political albums that marked a departure from the band’s signature Southern Gothic storytelling.
Welcome 2 Club XIII, on the other hand, as indicated by its cover art, is a much more classic DBTs affair (and, in some respects, a self-mythologizing one), songwriters Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley both pointing their eyes toward the past, looking back at their own “glory days” and re-analyzing them with the wisdom that can only come from experience.
Although the band’s dual-guitar fronted fusion of rock and various Southern styles is always a pleasure to hear, the measure of any DBTs album is ultimately the strength of the stories presented within. In that respect,
Welcome 2 Club XIII is a particularly strong showcase for Hood’s talents, as he pens seven out of these nine tracks and spins several poignant tales. Perhaps most striking and interesting in the context of the band’s discography is seven-minute opener “The Driver.” Built around a chugging riff and Hood’s spoken-word vocals (reminiscent of some of his early classics such as “The Three Great Alabama Icons” off the landmark
Southern Rock Opera), the song presents Hood recalling memories of scenes and encounters on the road, “Trying to make sense of the pieces of my life,” culminating in a harrowing list of apparently real near-accidents (“That ten-degree decline headed down Teton Pass / Cooley driving, snow on solid ice”). The song builds to an intense, fuzz-guitar laden conclusion that one can imagine the band really letting it rip on in live shows. The album’s closer “Wilder Days” (also penned by Hood) acts as a sort of companion piece. In this song, an old picture of a lover or a friend (one imagines it could even be Cooley) is the catalyst for a reflection on aging and the naive, death-defying attitudes of youth, leading to a resolution which could serve as a thesis for the whole album: “I find it best to laugh at the absurdity of life above the ground / There's no comfort in survival but it's still the best option that I've found.” This song is also wonderfully atmospheric, grounded by a repeating acoustic guitar line and accented by melancholic flourishes of slide guitar and backing vocals from Mississippi songwriter Schaefer Llana (whose voice also graces “The Driver,” further bolstering the impression of these bookends as companions).
But despite these and other songs’ emphasis on survival despite the odds, several of the album’s songs dwell on those whose stories didn’t end so well. Cooley’s “Every Single Storied Flameout” problematizes the glorification of rock’s famous “gone too soon” legends, though the song’s narrator doesn’t spare himself (“I’d have a lot of nerve to go feigning shock and outrage / If I’d lived my example, I’d be worse”), warning the listener not to give into their “damage-seeking” tendencies. The tune is classic Cooley, all rapid-fire, sneering vocals and rip-roaring guitars, the words locking into the melodies perfectly. On a more sympathetic note, Hood’s “We Will Never Wake You Up in the Morning” tells the story of a beloved friend lost to alcoholism, while “Shake and Pine” (which Hood in a recent interview with Craig Finn identifies as being about his friend “New York’s Favorite Cheese Man” James Coogan) presents a struggle for meaning and self-worth when all always seems to go wrong (“You shake and pine / For a way out of this hell besides a life of crime / Standing before judgment, it'd be so sublime / To step out of your shadow and walk towards the sun”). Less critical than Cooley’s take-down, these two songs, bolstered by atmospheric and melancholic backing from the band, evoke pathos like the best of Truckers songs, Hood producing some wonderfully haunting imagery.
From this breakdown one might think the album is all downers, but the band know how to vary the pace and intensity effectively. “The Driver” has an appropriately driving pace, as do both of Cooley’s tunes, which each pack in surprises such as the psychedelic guitars in “Maria’s Awful Disclosures” and the horns that burst out of the latter half of “Every Single Storied Flameout.” The title track is also a fun rootsy number, an ode to the bar where Hood and Cooley spent much of their younger years playing shows with their pre-DBTs band Adam’s House Cat. Hood tributes the club’s apathetic bartenders, bawdy disco lights, and impolite patrons, concluding, “Our glory days did kinda suck.” But as he notes in the aforementioned interview with Craig Finn, much as the club and the times spent there may seem to suck in retrospect, he is glad for them; the song is clearly tongue-in-cheek, but in a loving way.
While
Welcome 2 Club XIII may not be the kind of album that will win the band many new fans, and doesn’t hold a candle to the band’s classics, it is still an excellent work from one of the best acts in the business and a convincing course correction after two solid but admittedly subpar albums (by Truckers standards). Not every song works; “Maria’s Awful Disclosures,” while good lyrically, contains some awkward vocal melodies and doesn’t mesh topically with the rest of the songs here, which otherwise are cohesive enough to work as a loose concept album, and as fun as the title track is it doesn’t quite gel as convincingly as it ought to. Additionally, if the musicianship on display doesn’t bear mentioning as consistently as the words they support, the band play with a sturdiness and intuition that speak to their veteran status, each member contributing what is necessary to serve Hood and Cooley’s songs. That the band still have interesting things to say this far into their career is impressive in itself, and on the strength of this album, they show no signs of stopping any time soon.
