A Blessing and a Curse

Drive-By Truckers. <i> New West</i>

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Pity those poor Drive-By Truckers, stuck in a rut, making one great album after another. The band’s latest isn’t a towering masterpiece along the lines of their 2001 breakthrough, Southern Rock Opera, but its stinging vignettes of down-and-dirty living have the resonance of a great short-story collection. Amid ornery guitars that cross the Stones and Lynyrd Skynyrd, scruffy singers Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley lace their woeful tales with plenty of mordant humor and vivid details, transcending obvious white-trash clichés. The footstomping “Aftermath USA” seems to be a jokey saga of excess, only to veer off into images of blood in the sink and crystal meth in the bathtub. Elsewhere, the eerie “World of Hurt” closes the show by meditating on suicide, arguing it’s better to hang on and feel pain than quit—a conclusion all the more compelling for the angst that precedes it.

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BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things they don’t like—which is most things that are true.

No one gets to tell Mother Jones what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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