The Dirty South (2004)

The Dirty South (2004)

If the divorce-themed Decoration Day examines the destruction of a relationship, the glacial, smoldering The Dirty South sounds like the monstrous diesel engine garbage truck that comes to collect the detritus and run over the small pieces. The darkest of the nine official Drive-By Truckers releases, The Dirty South is a jewel of an album that captures the band at their yowling, howling best. Patterson’s “Puttin’ People On The Moon” is an update on Gil-Scott Heron’s “Whitey On The Moon,” and is nearly as excoriating. Like the Heron classic, Hood personalizes the issue of wasteful government spending, paralleling Heron’s rat-bitten sister Nell with his own cancer-stricken Mary Alice, to lacerating rhetorical effect. Cooley’s “Carl Perkins Cadillac” is rock history in six immaculate verses, and Hood’s fittingly vertiginous “Tornadoes” rivals any song in his catalog; but The Dirty South belongs to Isbell. If Drive-By Truckers fans initially viewed the young songwriter as an untested arriviste, his songwriting contributions to The Dirty South left any remaining naysayers picking crow from their teeth. “Goddamn Dirty Love” is an idiosyncratic love song that recalls nothing so much as barroom mystic-era Tom Waits, while the wobbly atonement described in “Danko-Manuel” is the sound of a gifted writer discovering his voice and composing well beyond his years. Coupled with his two contributions to Decoration Day, the three Isbell-penned songs on The Dirty South (the third is the frosty “Never Gonna Change”) distinguish Isbell’s narrative voice from those of his bandmates. Though still maintaining the Drive-By Truckers modus operandi — romaticism with a caveat, heritage with an asterisk — the Isbell of The Dirty South is the sound of a man desperate to seek his own path, and discovering it alone. The album’s second half is dominated by a suite of songs about Buford Pusser, the real-life inspiration for the 1973 film Walking Tall, and continues the band’s trend toward parallel narratives told through different points of view. If the album falls just short of reaching the vaunted highlights of its nearest sonic analogue Southern Rock Opera and seems mysteriously less than the sum of its parts, it is only due to the disparity of the three principle songwriters’ contributions. Regardless, The Dirty South deserves a place of honor in any rock history book yet to be written.