While the many strains of rock & more can do looking back, none quite do it like country. The whole genre seems as much an ode to a country gone by as it is about today or tomorrow, sometimes for the sonically worse (there’s a lot about the old days that were bad and are blindly forgotten), but sometimes for the better, a sweet twang that can speak to even city-dwellers. The by-now-venerable Drive-By Truckers look back at their wild past & more on Welcome 2 Club XIII.
As befits a band entering their 26th year with their 14th album, the old days on the road are a big subject for Welcome, starting with the dark drive of the opener “The Driver”, but also the big rock celebration of the past in “Every Single Storied Flameout” and distant road of yesterday with closer “Wilder Days”. There are more personal tales of hell-raising times & friends in the resigned “We will never wake you up in the morning” and sweetly wistful “Forged In Hell and Heaven Sent”. And one hopes that the honky-tonk juke joint of the honky-tonk title track is still open & still rockin’.
One has to have lived a life to be able to look back on it, to remember when the years started with “19” and there was no social media to document everything as it happened. Drive-By Truckers nicely drive through their past on Welcome 2 Club XIII.
