Drive-By Truckers - Go-Go Boots

Southern Baptist preachers have a funny knack of ending up in a world of shit whenever they appear in Drive-By Truckers songs. They have many names — "Reverend Bob," "your daddy," "the preacher" — but their fates rarely befit men of God. At best, they're "mad as hell," crankily towing an adversary out of a roadside ditch ("Zip City"), at worst, they find themselves "dead on the bedroom floor" ("The Wig He Made Her Wear").

On Go-Go Boots, the Truckers' 11th studio effort, co-frontman Patterson Hood upholds that songwriting meme, sparing no detail chronicling the real-life rise and fall of an Alabama preacher who paid a couple of guys to off his wife so he could take up with his bimbo mistress and the go-go boots she loved to wear — two songs are dedicated to the sordid affair. During one — eight-minute album centerpiece "The Fireplace Poker" — amid haunting piano trills, a metronomic-yet-elastic rhythm section groove and periodic crescendos that might leave the inside of your head buzzing with an incurable tension, Hood weaves the tale with bone-chilling precision and widescreen wisdom: "The Bible said that Jesus bled for the sins of the rest of us/ The reverend had his wife done in for $1,500 bucks."

That's not to say that the DBTs are retracing their footsteps. Anyone expecting the same old twang 'n' guitar crunch the band made its name on will be plenty surprised by this album's smoldering country-soul aesthetic. But what's surprising is how long it's taken DBT to find this sound. Most band members grew up in the Muscle Shoals area of North Alabama in the '70s — an era when the Shoals, an otherwise Podunk town, inexplicably became a world capital of soul, churning out hits from the likes of Percy Sledge and the Staples Singers. Hood's dad, David Hood, was the famed Muscle Shoals rhythm section bass player.

Accordingly, the ghosts of Shoals' golden era can be found deep in the grooves of Go-Go Boots. The album (recorded to 16-track tape) was taken largely from sessions that produced last year's The Big To-Do, which saw DBT in full-on rock mode and was terrific but necessitated that the band's three songwriters — Hood, guitarist Mike Cooley and bassist Shonna Tucker — swap some usual profundity and broad thematic strokes with extra distortion and melody. Go-Go Boots, however, is largely opposite its predecessor — mellower, more soulful, darker. There are, for instance, two stupendous covers of unheralded Muscle Shoals soul singer-songwriter Eddie Hinton.

The Shoals influence creeps into the band's own songwriting too, from opener "I Do Believe," a catchy reverie about Hood's grandmother, to the title song, which settles into perhaps the spookiest, funkiest groove DBT has yet laid down, abetted by their secret weapon, guitarist and pedal steel man John Neff, whose filthy slide sounds like the devil walking.

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