When Patterson Hood was 8 years outdated, he began writing songs. Bullied in school and making dangerous grades anyway, he jotted down lyrics in his pocket book throughout class, even dreamed up a number of idea albums. Round that very same time, he turned obsessive about Disney’s Pinocchio, memorizing full scenes and performing them out by himself within the yard. The movie’s darkish tone piqued his creativeness, particularly all of the alarming transformations: boys into donkeys, wooden into flesh, kids into grown-ups. Maybe the 8-year-old Patterson even wrote a tune about it. Fifty years later, the grownup Patterson penned “Pinocchio,” a quiet, bouncy ballad about what constitutes happiness later in life: “Heaven is a home with a contemporary kitchen/Heaven has the tempo of a sluggish information day.” Buried in its cartoon imagery is a meditation on songwriting and Hood’s countless pursuit “for a line that may save my soul.”
“Pinocchio” closes out Exploding Timber & Airplane Screams, the fourth official album beneath the Drive-By Truckers co-founder’s personal title—his first solo launch in practically 13 years, his most adventurous and stunning, and his finest. These new songs are nearly self-consciously rooted in his love of movie (“cinematic moist streets mirror the clouds,” he sings on “The Forks of Cypress”), however they’ve the weirdness of Pinocchio. One of many foremost chroniclers of the fashionable, deeply conflicted South, Hood exhibits a penchant for hanging surrealism, for jarring juxtapositions that render in any other case mundane photographs unusual and unsettling. Opener “Exploding Timber,” for instance, paperwork a very violent ice storm that hit his north Alabama hometown in 1994. He describes waterlogged bushes crashing beneath the load of ice, “like fireworks within the ice storm.” That description alone is memorable, however the tune concludes with one more evocative picture, of “the Magnificence Queen/Crushed beneath the pines on the frozen road.”
It is all the time tempting to consider albums like this as short-story collections, however Exploding Timber is extra akin to a Criterion compilation of brief movies. Hood, who has penned songs about John Ford, Walt Disney, and different filmmakers, writes with visuals in thoughts, which suggests his lyrics have a tendency towards the starkly descriptive. “A Werewolf and a Lady,” a duet with Lydia Loveless, describes two deeply damaged individuals making an attempt to get snug with one another as they watch An American Werewolf in London and have essentially the most desultory intercourse conceivable. It’s a supremely bleak breakup tune, nevertheless it’s a ray of sunshine in comparison with “The Pool Home,” which strings collectively a sequence of photographs that coalesce right into a story a few man considering suicide. Hood units it up as a film scene, with the character taking one final skinnydip earlier than hanging himself exterior the pool home. In sharp distinction to the offended suicide tune he wrote for Ornament Day and the grieving suicide tune he wrote for Welcome 2 Membership XIII, “The Pool Home” is nearly spookily matter-of-fact, as Hood struggles to know such a self-annihilating act: “How may his head inform him one thing so mistaken and make it really feel so proper?”
