Drive-By Truckers - The Unraveling 4/5
For almost 25 years Drive-By Truckers have been supplying alternative Americana to a fevered fan base so it's no surprise that this year's 'The Unraveling' has no big departures from their sound. However this may be their most political album yet.
Opening track 'Rosemary With A Bible And A Gun' is a somber, aching affair regarding the narrator's true love in a world of decaying American infrastructures and cold patricical possessiveness, it has a weariness but it's misdirection as immediately we're catapulted into 'Armageddon's Back In Town' a roaring boot in the balls directed at the crotch of a particularly nasty, orange hued President.
There's more political anger, albeit it jauntily angry, on 'Thoughts And Prayers' which is exactly what you think it's about. Frustration at the constant flow of insipid lip service that follows any number of the never ending shootings the USA deals with almost weekly.
In fact the album is very much a bitter indictment on the decay of Northern America and the head-in-the-sand willing ignorance that many use just to get by day to day. On '21st Century America' Patterson Hood illustrates this in the plainest terms and it feels like an oil painting of trash. Beautiful but the subject matter is not nice to look at.
Drug use, the Trump administration's horrific immigration policies, endless right wing media lies all get examined and while it paints a damning portrait of modern America it also howls out with a message to say that there are dissident voices amongst the endless, empty Fox News babble and evangelical liars and they are ready to fight back.