Drive-By Truckers - The Unraveling

I'll say it right up front. Drive-By Truckers are the most important rock band in the US right now. Yes, I love Phish and their glorious jamming, Wilco and their quirky neo-psychedelia, and many other bands, but nobody right now is writing songs with the anger and power of the Drive-By Truckers. They're the closest thing to being the US equivalent of Canada's greatest band, The Tragically Hip.

Their latest album, The Unravaveling, is out and it's a gem of a record, full of songs that matter, and that you can dance to. From "Thoughts and Prayers":

When my children's eyes look at me and they ask me to explain

It hurts me that I have to look away

The powers that be are in for shame and comeuppance

When Generation Lockdown has their day

They'll throw the bums all out and drain the swamp for real

Perp walk them down the Capitol steps and show them how it feels

Tramp the dirt down, Jesus, you can pray the rod they'll spare

Stick it up your ass with your useless thoughts and prayers

Stick it up your ass with your useless thoughts and prayers

Relix magazine has just published a review cum profile of the band. It's worth reading.

Patterson Hood was admittedly a “weird kid”—the kind of eight year old who came home from school and flipped on the Watergate hearings. “I actually got in trouble in fourth grade for writing a paper about Watergate that was very critical of the president,” he recalls. “This was an Alabama public school, and my teacher did not like it. She sent a note home to my parents, and it was one of the few times where they actually took my side. They were like, ‘We’re OK with this.’”

Almost five decades later, not much has changed for the Drive-By Truckers songwriter—instead of scribbling about the political corruption of Richard Nixon on notebook paper, he’s using his Southern rock band’s 12th LP to document the horror, divisiveness and all-around insanity of living through the Donald Trump era.

Hood and longtime bandmate Mike Cooley, who formed the group in 1996, have written longer-form conceptual pieces before— including their 2001 opus Southern Rock Opera, which uses the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash as a springboard into misconceptions about the American South. But the thematic connective tissue of this year’s The Unraveling is essentially “everything is broken.” Across nine cathartic cuts, the band touches on mass shootings (the folky “Thoughts and Prayers”), migrant separation (the soulful “Babies in Cages”), drug abuse (the tightly coiled rocker “Heroin Again”), bloodshed born from white privilege (the somber “Grievance Merchants”), domestic violence (the thundering “Slow Ride Argument”) and shriveling job prospects in dilapidated small towns (the twangy ballad “21st Century USA”).