Patterson Hood
Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams
ATO
I’m not sure when, exactly, but at some point, Drive-By Truckers started to give Pavement a run for their money as every cool contemporary band’s defining reference point. As indie rock continues to become infected with charming, country-fried storytellers like MJ Lenderman, the Truckers’ barroom rocking has become more culturally relevant than ever. This makes it the ideal moment for Patterson Hood’s first solo record in over a decade. With his main band, Hood has made a living on blending boozy, late-night rock and roll with a grizzled thoughtfulness and perspective. Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams both softens and complicates this formula, distinguishing itself to mixed results.
Hood has always been a writer for whom specificity is essential. His band’s 2001 LP Southern Rock Opera doesn’t attempt to tell the whole story, but it sure as hell reveals his. Exploding Trees literalizes things even further, tracking Hood’s adolescence in the kind of detail that’s rare from even the most naked of songwriters. The prologue comes in the form of “Exploding Trees,” a distorted and more pointed sister to the Truckers’ 2008 song “Tornadoes.” This time, the natural disaster in question is a vicious ice storm set in 1994, which caused waterlogged trees to come down on houses and cars all over the city, just as Hood prepares to leave his hometown of Florence, Alabama.
From there, things go backwards as vignettes mark moments both big and small. The best of these benefit not only from precise character study but also the kind of complicated introspection that comes with 30-plus years of hindsight. “Pinocchio,” the record’s closer, finds Hood pulling the strings on a story he seems to be retelling himself again and again. In the record’s exhaustive liner notes, he talks in detail about his obsession with the titular wooden boy and his own deep-seated feelings of inadequacy surrounding undiagnosed learning disabilities. While this isn’t made nearly as plain within the song, Hood captures the feeling of a man looking back with both clarity and a healthy sense of uncertainty. “Truth can hurt a lot, but a lie destroys / Deep inside of every man is a real live boy,” he sings, more aspirational than certain.
There are times when you wish Exploding Trees felt a little less tethered to fact. For all the grainy shoebox polaroids we get, there’s something to be said for the moments when Hood allows himself a few flights of fancy. “The Pool House,” a kind of haunted, string-accented fever dream, benefits from its vague, drifting, and suggestive storytelling mode, one that feels rare on the record. It’s refreshing to find just how thoroughly Hood challenges himself from a structural perspective. Almost none of the songs on Exploding Trees would fit on a Drive-By Truckers record. Even when the subject matter remains familiar—as on “Miss Coldiron’s Oldsmobile,” a hazy sense memory of chipped paint and overstuff gutters—the absolute deluge of synths and droning bass clarinet skew Hood’s typical angle of approach.
The record also provides an excuse for collaboration. Hood brings in Lydia Loveless and Waxahtchee’s Katie Crutchfield in successive songs early in the album, the former of whom provides an incredible foil on “A Werewolf and a Girl,” perhaps the least romantic love song of all time—the line “You need to put it in me before I go and change my mind” is somehow crass, sad, and sexy at the same time. The only ill-conceived feature on the record is, ironically, the one that makes the most sense on paper. Bringing in Truckers’ acolytes Wednesday to rip through a song like “Van Pelt Parties” seems a slam dunk, but this is pointedly not a Truckers record, and this song doesn’t seem aware of that, jarringly slicing its way through the album.
It’s here where the central tension of Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams is most obvious. For those interested in something that separates Hood as a solo artist from his other work, this record provides just that, even if those very same people might have to admit that it may not come together in quite the same way.
