When Patterson Hood was 8 years previous, he began writing songs. Bullied at college and making dangerous grades anyway, he jotted down lyrics in his pocket book throughout class, even dreamed up just a few 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, youngsters into grown-ups. Maybe the 8-year-old Patterson even wrote a track 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 Bushes & Airplane Screams, the fourth official album below the Drive-By Truckers co-founder’s personal title—his first solo launch in practically 13 years, his most adventurous and stunning, and his greatest. These new songs are virtually 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 reveals a penchant for putting surrealism, for jarring juxtapositions that render in any other case mundane pictures unusual and unsettling. Opener “Exploding Bushes,” for instance, paperwork a very violent ice storm that hit his north Alabama hometown in 1994. He describes waterlogged bushes crashing below the load of ice, “like fireworks within the ice storm.” That description alone is memorable, however the track concludes with yet one more evocative picture, of “the Magnificence Queen/Crushed beneath the pines on the frozen road.”
It is all the time tempting to think about albums like this as short-story collections, however Exploding Bushes 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 implies his lyrics have a tendency towards the starkly descriptive. “A Werewolf and a Woman,” a duet with Lydia Loveless, describes two deeply damaged individuals attempting to get snug with one another as they watch An American Werewolf in London and have probably the most desultory intercourse possible. It’s a supremely bleak breakup track, nevertheless it’s a ray of sunshine in comparison with “The Pool Home,” which strings collectively a collection of pictures that coalesce right into a story a couple of 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 indignant suicide track he wrote for Ornament Day and the grieving suicide track 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 incorrect and make it really feel so proper?”
