Now, they've taken to transcending them on Decoration Day, the exhilarating follow-up to Southern Rock Opera. "And Lord knows I can't change'/Sounds better in the song/Than it does with hell to pay," Cooley sings on "Sounds Better in the Song," a weary breakup ballad. Ronnie Van Zant flew high, mostly rising above the ambiguity that plagues the Drive-By Truckers throughout the stirring, literate 64-minute course of this album. Ronnie at least knew where he stood. Decoration Day, in turn, is like a Faulkner novel for burned-out road hogs. In the Truckers' subtly rockin' post-Opera world, fathers let down sons, sons betray fathers, bankers destroy fathers' and sons' dreams, men lose women, husbands leave wives-to-be at the altar, brothers defend sisters, brothers and sisters deflower each other and the nights and days on the road grow longer -- and longer, and longer . . . The confessions are alarming, but the prescriptions are meek ("Don't tell them you're bigger than Jesus," says the screw-up of a dad to his son from afar on "Outfit").
It may all seem like prototypical redneck garbage, as if a mullet joke has to be cynically tacked on there somewhere. Hood, Cooley and third guitarist/songwriter Jason Isbell, though, infuse their narratives with a colloquial wisdom that mixes humor with piercing observation. The album lyrically is inspiring, so that when Cooley preaches "Rock 'n' roll means well/But it can't help telling young boys lies" (on "Marry Me." Amen!) or the scratchy-voiced Hood intones "Never homesick, ain't got no home" (on the blistering "Hell No, I Ain't Happy"), it all envelops the soul. The Drive-By Truckers' voice, in its wit and honesty, is wholly unique -- to brand it simply as Southern rock, as others have done, is lazy. Decoration Day feels like an awakening from an off-putting dream, the sun in a dense fog.
