A Blessing And A Curse is no Drive-By Truckers fan’s favorite album, but it remains a crucial piece of the puzzle, providing one of the clearest depictions of a great band in turmoil since Let It Be. Growing rifts within the band are reflected in an album that is disjointed and lumpy. It is the first Drive-By Truckers album since Pizza Deliverance to not contain some thematic element threading each songwriter’s contributions together; as such, the album feels less like a cohesive work than a collection of odds and ends. Isbell’s increasingly commercial songs prove particularly incompatible, and his Ryan Adams-sounding contributions to A Blessing And A Curse prove, for the first time, to be more curse than blessing. Still, the album is by no means a stinker: “Space City” is Cooley’s attempt to recapture the magic of his own excellent “Zip City,” and comes within spitting distance; Hood’s “Feb 14th” opens the album with a sterling pop-rocker that would have fit snugly on any great Replacements disc; and closing track “A World Of Hurt” is a wistful talking-blues that seems to confront, perhaps in code, some of the alienation occurring within the band. Still, the album is marred by a feeling of transition teetering on spiritual bankruptcy; even the runtime — a relatively paltry 47 minutes — is nearly ten minutes shorter than any other Drive-By Truckers album to date. Cracks were showing.