Patterson Hood – Murdering Oscar (And Other Love Songs)

Album Reviews • Thursday July 9th, 2009 • 8:11 am

If Patterson Hood’s new solo album, Murdering Oscar (And Other Love Songs), begs the usual question—that of why an active member of a celebrated and successful rock band would bother releasing an album all on his own—the answer that it provides is something far more complicated and involved, doubtless a natural byproduct of just how special the Drive-by Truckers really are. The “solo album” often indicates that the artist wishes to do something he isn’t quite able to get away with in his day job, but that’s decidedly not the case with Murdering Oscar; individually, any one song here could fit just fine on a Truckers album, both musically and lyrically. And given their relentlessly busy schedule of touring, recording, and session work—they backed Booker T. Jones on his own album released earlier this year, and they’ve got another disc of their own on the way—it’s unlikely that Hood thinks the Truckers are running out of gas.

I submit, then, that Hood is releasing a solo album because he almost has to: The man is a prolific writer, and, given that some of these songs date back to the early 1990s, it stands to reason that he just might need an outlet for all the excess material he’s accumulated. To put it another way, he’s doing this because this is just what he does—he’s a songwriter and a record-maker, and he can’t restrain himself from always working.

That’s a good way to consider this album: As the product of a craftsman who’s simply doing what he does. Indeed, there is a certain workmanlike quality to this recording, with Hood obviously not trying to establish himself as a talent apart from the role he fills in the Truckers; half the Truckers show up to play on this album, and it’s produced by Hood with long-time Truckers collaborator David Barbe. The songs are a bit folksier and more muted than what you’d hear on a Truckers album, but they still fit the basic description of slightly-twangy, literate rock and roll.

It does, however, rock a little softer than any Truckers album, and the twang is much less pronounced. This is the other distinctive characteristic of Hood solo: Pick any one song and you could almost imagine yourself listening to the Truckers, but on the whole, the album is something very different from anything Hood’s done with his full band. Hood may be the band’s de facto leader, and many of the group’s traits and obsessions are distilled in his solo material, but if the seed of the Truckers is present here, the full breadth of their talents and vision isn’t. Without Mike Cooley on board, Hood loses the golden, AM country radio sound and gritty Dixie folk that added so much color and character to albums like last year’s wonderful Brighter Than Creation’s Dark. He also loses some of the muscle, and even the more rock-oriented numbers on this set are more about sounding moody and brooding than providing Truckers-style firepower.

Lyrically, too, you might consider this record to be a dramatically simplified, reductionist version of the Truckers. On the surface, all the usual elements are in place—descriptive and empathetic portraits of life in the South, flashes of jarring violence and calamity, quiet wisdom and compassion. But in the Drive-by Truckers, Hood is one voice among three, and the beauty lies in the rich, multi-faceted perspective cultivated by those three voices. Here, he doesn’t have Cooley to balance his tendencies toward wistfulness with righteous anger or bitter fatalism; so while songs like the amoral paean in the title track and the relational turmoil of “Pollyanna” could work on a Truckers album, they’d be given more depth and tension if they were complemented by Cooley songs.

To his credit, though, Hood realizes that, and he does his best to stretch out and keep things varied here. He is increasingly the Truckers’ go-to guy for songs about domestic issues, and here he writes some sweet, intimate gems that Cooley could never pull off: The daydreaming “Granddaddy,” the charmingly silly “She’s a Little Randy,” and—best of all—the swirling, ponderous beauty of “Pride of the Yankees,” one of the most poignant 9/11 songs written yet. Songs like these help give Murdering Oscar a bit of character, helping it to overcome its duller, more workmanlike moments to become something personal and worthwhile.

Tagged as: Athens, Rock

By Josh Hurst