The Dirty South

iTunes Review

The title is the only jokey thing about Drive-By Truckers’ Dirty South, which is not, of course, crunk; more like socialist realism with distorted guitars — three of them, in fact, belonging to three of the smartest songwriters at work today. Fierce, populist, and unfashionably straightforward, the band’s sixth effort marries the myth-making sprawl of Southern Rock Opera with the urgency and emotional punch of Decoration Day, its critically beloved predecessors. These boys from Alabama are storytellers as much as musicians, giving voice to people you don’t hear much from in popular music. Like the narrator of “Puttin’ People on the Moon,” who gets laid off from the Ford plant, loses his health insurance, watches his wife die from cancer, and ends up working at Walmart and looking back longingly at his stint as a drug-dealer. (“And if you say I’m being punished, ain’t He got better things to do?”) Elsewhere, a tornado sucks Bobbi Jo McLean’s husband out a window, John Henry’s the victim of the beancounters at corporate, and the gang who killed Buford Pusser (immortalized in the movie Walking Tall) tells their side of the story: “I’m just a hard-working man with a family to feed / And he made my daughter cry.” Musically, the sound is grittier and less countrified than Decoration Day — bye-bye pedal steel, hello kick drum and power chords — but melodic and even pretty where it suits, as in the goosebump-inducing “Danko/Manuel,” the rueful highlight of an album that finds plenty to mourn.