“River Takes the Town” plunges The Wood Brothers’ One Drop of Truth into a world of breached levees and resilience from track one. The following nine songs are left to seek hope in the sodden aftermath of disaster. Even as the album’s often joyful, always human stories unfold and crackle with inspiration, intoxication or love, the haunting sense of irreparable change lingers.
This feeling is driven home in a single word by the end of track two, “Happiness Jones.” When the instruments drop out, vocalist Oliver Wood is left more spitting than singing, his repeated insistence that he’s “happy, happy, happy” rendered incredulous, any revelations undermined by a deeper, lurking ill. Throughout, this unreliability makes One Drop of Truth’s collected vignettes familial, all the while propelled by a confident musical dexterity that both conjures and toys with the emotions tied to each individual narrative.
Jano Rix and the eponymous brothers Oliver and Chris Wood deliver an education in the twang, slide, and grooves of American roots rock. They stomp and climb like The Band on “Happiness Jones” and release Jimi Hendrix stabs laser guitar a la “Crosstown Traffic” on “Sky High” before settling down for back-porch-at-sunset acoustic plucking over heavy strings that wouldn’t sound out of place in an Alan Jackson ballad with the soft, wrenching highlight “Strange as it Seems.”
You can hear the Nashville trio’s two decades together in vocal harmonies that swirl along instrumental spires on the boisterous “Laughin’ or Cryin’” or come in smooth, plateauing layers on the jaunty, jangly, yet deeply morose “Sparkling Wine.” Left alone, Oliver Wood’s haunted, weathered voice evokes Eric Burdon or a reined-in Tom Waits.
On the instrumental side, Chris Wood’s deliberate upright bass delivers a steady spine, while the multi-talented Rix offers the wide-ranging chops (and not just on his signature “shuitar”) that have found him on the road and in-studio with artists from Damian Marley to Zac Brown. Delightfully, the trio is never far from indulging in tight mid-tempo boogies and effortless Muscle Shoals grooves, sprinkling in the odd organ solo to round out their sound. This flexibility delivers a cohesive palette without falling into a lull of sameness, or having to err on the distractingly disparate side of life to keep our attention.
“Can’t Look Away” brings One Drop of Truth to a resolute, hopeful end. The song’s title is first an accusation and later a command — a response to the album’s great question, made explicit in “River Takes the Town”: What is to be done in the wake of tragedy? Their answer: Rather than gawk, try to empathize; rather than become isolated observers, come together to celebrate and to cope as community.
With that directive, the album leaves off where it began, riverside and laying down the facts. While the hope is that the levees do what they’re “s’posed to do,” the rain’s still coming, and the flood, proverbial or otherwise, is always imminent. As the band says, there’s always wisdom to be had from the toughest day. While looking past can temporarily assuage trauma, real progress comes from searching and strive towards truth and from considering the causes and deeper circumstances that drive action. After all: “You got the dark and light / it’s never just black or white / or even grey. “