Drive By Truckers - Live From Austin TX

  by Benjamin Howarth

published: 10 / 7 / 2009

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Review

There’s nothing inherently special about the Drive By Truckers. Having gradually evolved from a southern-style hard rock band into a southern-style country-blues rock band over the past decade, they have stamped down their authority and built a fanbase on the simple virtues of their song book. Despite losing one of their three singer-songwriters Jason Isbell to a solo career in 2007, and with him a few of the stand-out parts of their back catalogue, the Truckers released their best selling album a year later, the 19 track tour de force ‘Brighter Than Creation’s Dark’. Here, they reinforced all the best parts of what had made them good in the past - heart rendered soul searching, plain spoken lyrics that rang true and, when the mood strikes, all out rock. This live album picks up where ‘Brighter..’ left off, easing some of the band’s older songs in gently alongside those from their latest release, as they promote it on the cable show Austin City Limits. I saw the band play on the same tour, where - drenched in sweat - they gave Camden’s Electric Ballroom the full force of their three guitar attack. It was magnificent. On television, they are slightly more restrained, at least for the first half of the performance, but this means that this package gives anyone unlucky not enough to have seen them in person a decent taste of what those of us who have enjoyed. Of no dispute at all is that Patterson Hood, the band’s leader loves what he does dearly. "I never saw Lyrnryd Skynyrd, but I sure saw AC/DC… Let there be rock,” he sings on the stand out track from 2001‘s ‘Southern Rock Opera‘, before the band launch into the kind of guitar solo his heroes would have been proud of. Even earlier in the set, when with acoustic guitars round their necks, the Truckers explore their more recently acquired love of the country, that sense of the simple integrity of rock ‘n’ roll shows through. ‘The Righteous Path’, the stand-out moment from ‘Brighter…’ is perhaps their signature tune. The song’s narrator has “Junk out in the backyard and a case of beer, got a boat that ain’t seen water in years… I’m just trying to stay focused on the Righteous Path“, while his friend has “Trouble with the law and the IRS, and where he’ll get the money’s anybody’s guess, he’s a long way but if you was to ask, he’s say I’m trying to stay on the Righteous Path”. Fans, old and new alike, will devour this. Buy it, and you’ll wish you’d become one too.

Track Listing:-

1 Perfect Timing
2 Heathens
3 A Ghost To Most
4 The Righteous Path
5 I'm Sorry Huston
6 3 Dimes Down
7 Puttin' People On The Moon
8 Space City
9 The Living Bubba
10 Zip City
11 18 Wheels Of Love
12 Let There Be Rock
13 Marry Me

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