Patterson Hood
Murdering Oscar (And Other Love Songs)
A collection of stand alone songs that Hood wrote over the last fifteen years--one of them dating back to the death of Kurt Cobain--Murdering Oscar initially sounds like an extended collection of Hood-specific Drive By Truckers songs. That's not a bad thing for those who think that the best Truckers songs are "The Man I Shot", "Two Daughters and a Beautiful Wife", "Dead, Drunk & Naked" and "Angels & Fuselage", all of which feature Hood on lead vocals. But while a solo album by Hood brought with it the high potential of good songs, it also carried concerns that it would arrive absent the scope that the best Truckers albums has. Southern Rock Opera and Blessing and a Curse aren't just the band's best work because they have their best songs contained within them, they're the best albums because they're the most fully realized of work-as-collective that the band has yet pulled off. And while Patterson is a star, he's physically incapable of playing three lead guitars at the same time and singing in the voice of a female to back up his regular vocals.
Thankfully, Murdering Oscar didn't go for epic, and Patterson didn't stop his fellow bandmates (or his father, a famous bass player) from backing him up. Hood's own refusal to accept the pigeonhole that genre expects out of him remains consistent--besides the Kurt Cobain song, the album's title is a nod to Woody Allen, and there's a bit of suburban gothic horror in the sarcastic "Screwtopia". (After giving his son a loaded gun to play with, the song's narrator turns to his wife and says "You were with my friend Clyde/He was my best friend until they pulled his face out of the dashboard...I always thought you were too good for him.") Considering the band's claims that 2010's upcoming full length will be both set in the present and "more rocking than anything we've done since disc 2 of Southern Rock Opera", an opportunity to spend time with Hood's solo efforts may have seemed like a warm-up event at first. But you didn't have to spend to much time with these exploratory attempts at redneck Raymond Carver for them to take hold, and after they did, there wasn't anything else that could fill that role.
-Tucker Stone, 2009
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