And the 400 Unit make it onto an (official) album, well the bones of the 400 Unit in Bass man Jimbo Hart and Keyboard player Derry de Borja, there’s still some churn to happen on the drum stool and at guitar sidekick and the small matter of a fiddler, but we’ll get there eventually.

Much like “Sirens Of The Ditch” upon release I didn’t think this album was all “that”. As I look at the track list now there are a couple of songs that stick out (“Cigarettes And Wine”, “The Last Song I Will Write”) but not many more that make me think I gotta listen to that right now. But then I start playing it and some of these songs start to jump out and change my mind about them. Overall, once again, this album isn’t going to break any musical barriers, Isbell is well versed in (outlaw) country, southern rock and soul music and he takes elements from all those styles to build his sound. What he does is gonna stand or fall on the quality of the songs.

“Seven Mile Island” starts us off with swampy slide guitars and the story of an unwanted pregnancy and a useless father who by songs end is telling his daughter “I just can’t be saved”. 2nd track “Sunstroke” is a beautiful piano led slowie with a lyric that hints at a breakup in process. Next song “Good” comes on all beefed up guitars, a proper (punk) rocker and is almost an apology from one party in the previous songs breakup to the other. It’s got a chorus that gets stuck in your head and you find yourself singing to yourself 4 days later.

Then we hit the first of the standout tracks, “Cigarettes And Wine”. It’s a plodding, barroom Country ballad, it’s as much about Isbell’s excesses as those of the girl that smelled of cigarettes and wine, who might not be a girl at all but a metaphor for the singers excesses. It’s a beaut of a song.

Side one’s lyrics contain a lot of Biblical references (“They tell me you walk on the water now”, “Guess the devil wouldn’t have you”, “Wings on her shoulders and feet”, “See the man’s got too much to count, Try to recollect the sermon on the mount, Blessed are the poor when they’re all swinging from the gallows”). Th religious overload is something of a hazard with US, especially, Country influenced music. It feels like there’s a confession of things the singer now regrets going on, referring back to that breakup and its causes.

Then we reach “Coda”, a 2 minute instrumental that splits the album down the middle and leads us into it’s second half, which starts with the bluesy “The Blue” beginning with the lines “Don’t roll away that stone, girl, Leave it where it lay”, another Biblical reference and a feeling that he will return to in future on “Southeastern”.

“No Choice In The Matter” is another piano led piece but in a style that wouldn’t be out of place in a small Gospel church and when the Stax like Horns hit for the chorus it’s a real pick up. The guitars are busted out and turned up again for “Soldiers Get Strange” and penultimate song “Streetlights” opens with “Where's that angel with dirty knees who wasn't hard to please when we first met?” harking back to the girl who smelled of cigarettes and wine.

“The Last Song I Will Write” feels like a wrap-up for all the apologies and excuses for the broken relationship at the start of the record. It’s a coming full circle for the album lyrically and musically as it it ends with the themes first met in “Coda” at the end of the first half of the album (strangely when this album was re-issued in 2019, the copy I own on lush Green vinyl, “Coda” was moved from the centre of the running order right to the end, after a cover version which isn’t on the original album, where it makes absolutely no sense !).

As I said about an Emmylou Harris album a few weeks back, if you’re after new sounds and new styles then this is the wrong place for you to be looking. Jason Isbell makes music very much set in a musical framework of Country, Soul and Southern Rock with which he is familiar and very proficient. But he writes great and interesting songs within that musical frame. As with his previous studio album, he will make better records than this but he is definitely progressing and I really like it better than this missive suggests. 

Cigarettes And Wine - https://youtu.be/AbxMZm0eP6s?si=levIgrh6982-SayY

This one is in the right place chronologically by when it was recorded but not when it was released. The recording itself was made on 16th November 2007 at a record shop in-store performance, but it was released on Record Store Day 2018. Effectively it’s something close to a bootleg that was issued by Isbell’s former record company, New West, and is a very early recording of him with what has become his full time backing band, the 400 Unit (named after the psychiatric ward of Eliza Coffee Memorial Hospital in Florence, Alabama incidentally). There are no band intro’s or credits on the record so I don’t know who the members of the 400 Unit were on this recording. It’s reported that Isbell was less than happy about its release, although the sharp eyed will note that the video I’ve included below is from his official YouTube channel.

There are only 6 songs, so it’s more of a mini LP/EP really, 2 from “Sirens Of the Ditch” (“Grown” and “Hurricanes And Hand Grenades”), 3 Truckers tunes (“Goddamn Lonely Love”, Danko/Manuel” and “Outfit”) and finally a spirited cover of Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic”.

It’s a faithful recording of an early Jason Isbell live show, maybe just one for the enthusiasts.

Hurricanes And Hand Grenades - https://youtu.be/yyS_PKA5jrw

It’s time to settle in for a lot of albums by a single artist, ya ready ? We’ve met Jason Isbell before, do you remember ? Well for those that don’t, for 3 glorious albums Jason Isbell was a member of the Drive-By Truckers. After joining in 2001, to help tour the album “Southern Rock Opera”, 6 years later on April 5, 2007 Isbell announced that he was no longer a Trucker. Just 3 months after that on July 10, 2007 “Sirens Of the Ditch” was released.

I’d particularly liked the songs Isbell had written and recorded with the Truckers so when I heard about a solo album I was really excited to hear what he’d done. Strangely, as he’d just left the band, 4 Truckers play on this album, singer/guitarist Patterson Hood, drummer Brad Morgan, Pedal steel player John Neff and bass player Shonna Tucker (although she and Isbell were, just about, still married at the time). They are joined by Muscle Shoals Swampers (the Swampers were the studio musicians connected to FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, AL) David Hood (Patterson’s Dad on bass) and legendary keyboardist Spooner Oldham.

On first hearing I was a little disappointed. His songs for the Truckers had always been so good, and some of these felt a little lacking. Then I got to thinking, the Truckers also had 2 other very good writers so the songs that Isbell got on to their records would have been his very best, maybe these were some of those that didn’t make it. Is there anything on here that would have made it to a Truckers record was what I was thinking at the time.

Well yes there is actually, but not a lot. It’s a much Bluesier/rockier sounding record than the Truckers made. Isbell is after all a very, very good guitar player as well as songwriter so he was, perhaps, putting some of that out there. The Stones-ish “Brand New Kind Of Actress” starts it up with a tougher, rockier style than we’ve heard from him previously. “Down In A Hole” has a more acoustic Blues feel to it. “Try” follows that and is almost an amalgam of its two predecessors, it has “…Actress” grumbling guitars but “…Hole”’s tempo.

There is then a 3 song run, being the last 2 on Side 1 and the first on Side 2, that are the best of “Sirens Of The Ditch”. “Chicago Promenade” is a beautiful, stately song based around a simple piano part and when Isbell hits the bit that isn’t the verse (I hesitate to call it a chorus as it only happens once) the melody lifts the entire song, you want more of it. It’s simple but effective and Isbell has said the song is about the death of his grandfather.

Next is “Dress Blues”, my very favourite song here, it was released as a single by both Isbell and covered by the Zac Brown Band and current Country wunderkind Zach Bryan. It tells the story of the death of Corporal Matthew Conley, a US Marine from Isbell's hometown who was killed by an IED in Iraq at the age of 21. It tells of his life and a future that won’t now happen and the scenes in his hometown as it prepares for his funeral (“There’s red, white and blue in the rafters, There’s silent old men from the Corps”). Each chorus ends with the lines

“But you never planned on the bombs in the sand, Or sleeping in your dress blues”

Dress Blues being the ceremonial uniforms of US Marines in which they are also buried. This would definitely have made it onto a Truckers album.

After all that death “Grown” is a blessed relief, a great song but stylistically I don’t think the Truckers would have gone there. What we have here is probably the first example of what Jason Isbell will grow into. It’s a coming of age song, a boy becoming a man thing. 

There is more to this record but nothing that really reaches the heights that those 3 do. “Hurricanes And Handgrenades” returns us to that Bluesy feel with some extra added Gospelness about it, “In A Razor Town” is an intricate acoustic thing and “Shotgun Wedding” is another that might well have made it to a Truckers record at a push. 

I’m a massive Jason Isbell fan. I think he’s one of THE great American songwriters working today, he has a way with melody and is a superb storytelling lyricist. He will make better records than this and his progression has been great to follow in real time, but this wasn’t as lacking a start as I thought it was at the time.

Dress Blues - https://youtu.be/SArC1H-CerU