Between Patterson Hood's Skynyrd songs and Mike Cooley's Stones songs, Drive-By Truckers has always been the ideal for Southern and country rock ever since 2001's Southern Rock Opera turned heads toward the band. But it wasn't until Decoration Day they took on their famed triple guitar attack and their less spoken-off triple songwriter attack. Jason Isbell only hangs around for this album and the next, but his contributions number among the album's best: A song based on the words of advice his father gave him before he left home ("Have fun but stay clear of the needle/Come home on your sister's birthday/Don't tell 'em you're bigger than Jesus/Don't give it away") and a titanic tale about a song questioning the intergenerational feud of which the protagonist questions the purpose. Isbell's songs would threaten to take over most any other album, but Cooley's "Marry Me" ("Your momma says I beat anything she's ever seen") and others stand up to it, and Hood runs the show as usual. He begins the album with two stunners ("The Deeper In" chronicles the story of one of the only jailed consensual incestuous couples in America, and "Sink Hole," a a fantasy about murdering the banker that took the land that's been in the family for generations that highlights the triple guitar attack that the band is capable of) and gives us three songs about the mental process of divorce. To show us the dirty South, Drive-By Truckers plays hard, dirty, and big. I can think of a few better modern songwriters in music. Craig Finn, Win Butler, Tunde Adebimpe, sure. You can't find me any trio better at storytelling, though.
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