The Complete Dirty South

The shock of this director’s-cut-style expansion of 2004’s classic *The Dirty South* isn’t its anger so much as how specific and well-calibrated that anger still feels. Thematically, the anchor is the idea that the spoils of those we call heroes—whether musicians (“Carl Perkins’ Cadillac”), outlaws (“Cottonseed”), veterans (“The Sands of Iwo Jima”), or activists (“The Day John Henry Died,” written by a young Jason Isbell)—pale in comparison to the masters, government agencies, and multinationals that exploit them. And those we call losers often die with nothing but credit-card debt and a song (“Puttin’ People on the Moon,” “Lookout Mountain”). As realists, the band knows it isn’t much, but as artists, they know it’s all they have. And so, with strained voices, crudely approximated Skynyrd licks, and a sense of class-driven frustration more akin to rap than classic Southern rock, they give it until they can’t give any more.

An expanded edition of 2004’s alarm-sounding masterpiece presents the century’s greatest Southern rock band at its most powerful and its most poignant.

After five years of playing anyplace that would have them and cutting three albums they released themselves, the Drive-By Truckers finally made a breakthrough in 2001 with Southern Rock Opera, a two-disc concept album about "the Duality of the Southern Thing" and the life and (literal) death of a band not unlike Lynyrd Skynyrd.