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Drive-By Truckers Album: “Gangstabilly”
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Release Date:2005-02-07
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Type:Unknown
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Genre:Rock, Indie Rock, The Coffeehouse
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Label:SMD Blueli
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Explicit Lyrics:Yes
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UPC:4028466323606
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Review - :
{$The Drive-By Truckers} don't need an agenda to be a good band. Sure, {^Southern Rock Opera} more or less anointed {$the Truckers} as a smarter, more attentive {$Lynyrd Skynyrd}, and critics, in turn, made them famous for all the wrong reasons. And while critics tossed around adjectives like "brash" and "raunchy" and dug out their riffs on {\Southern rock} revival and the renovation of {\country}, {^Gangstabilly}, {$DBT}'s debut, went largely overlooked. No mock-{\rock} {\operas} or anxious, insistent Southernism here -- {^Gangstabilly} keeps its charm by keeping it simple. Whereas post-{^Pizza Deliverance} {$DBT} tended to veer into weathered tailgate-party twang, {^Gangstabilly} is a swamp of mushy drums, scraggly acoustics, and pedal-steel whimper -- a catalog of trashy but telling details and broader yet personal pangs. NASCAR, monster-truck rallies, and countless episodes of {#COPS} and {#America Undercover} have melted the South down into a handful of stereotypes. But if frontman {$Patterson Hood} has shown anything, all you have to do to cut through the velvet {$Elvis}/TV rodeo/Haffenreffer muck of white-trash clichés is simply treat them seriously. While {$DBT} retain a campy sensibility to distance themselves from their songs, {$the Truckers}' South doesn't come without its share of loss and hardship. Take {&"Wifebeater,"} the album's opener. The title explains it all, but the subject matter is accepted as part of life, rendered like a conventional love song -- "Don't go back to him, he's a wife beater." The drums lurch, the pedal steel rises like steam, the harmonies go bullfrog-croak low, and {$Hood} puts you inside a would-be dismissed act of domestic violence. Then, there's {&"Panties in Your Purse"} -- a title which tells a whole newly painful story of a night of drinkin' and cheatin' in and of itself. But perhaps more than any song in their back catalog, {&"The Living Bubba"} perfects {$the Truckers}' combination of tough but hurt. Dedicated to the late Atlanta guitarist {$Gregory Dean Smalley}, {&"The Living Bubba"} comes through with an introverted, slowly ascending verse and a chorus you can flick a Bic to. Bottom line: do yourself a favor and don't ignore this album. The sad songs are sad the way you want them to be, the ballsier songs tempered with a little mellow manly pain. After {^Gangstabilly}, {$the Drive-By Truckers} would provide good albums, sure, but they'd be of the Napster-good sort, the buy-it-used sort. But for a brief moment, {$the Drive-By Truckers} created something whose praise wouldn't come by default, that wouldn't play immediately into critics' expectations. {^Gangstabilly} was a thankless job, but a good one. ~Bill Peters, All Music Guide
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