Drive-By Truckers - Southern Rock Opera (2001)

I knew this would happen. Turns out there's a new edition of 1,001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die and a bunch of albums need to be added to my list. Since it's not really fair to those new albums for them to wait until I'm done with my current list, I decided to reshuffle my random order to include the new albums. Not that it really matters, or that you, dear reader, would notice the difference.

Well, there is one consequence of reordering that I'm feeling right now in the form of a 94-minute alternative country album. Country is just not my genre, and the absolute dregs of country music started in the mid-90s and continues to this day. I can appreciate older classic country music; it has a charm and a pleasant homeliness. The new country music, like I suspect I'm about to hear from Drive-By Truckers, tends to have all the twang but none of the heart.

But it's wrong to judge before I listen so...

I don't want this review to just be a checklist of cliches, but the first song features a guy named Bobby driving a truck with an unnamed female passenger only refered to as "the girl" (ugh) and "Freebird" playing on the radio. The second song mentions Alabama, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Jimmie Johnson (probably the football coach) and a black "girl". It's weird to think of rap and country music having anything in common (except for how much I despise both), but it seems country music also has a habit of naming cliches they know their listeners will find cool. Country music loves itself some Neil Young and "Sweet Home Alabama".

Alternative country music takes hard blues rock and strips it of a cool groove or rhythm, replacing them with southern accents and songs about driving, whiskey, southern towns, and unnamed girls. It's basically the most vanilla and boring fusion ever. It's a lot like Bon Jovi. It's no surprise Bon Jovi eventually went country around 2005. Wait a minute... this song "Dead, Drunk And Naked" kinda sounds like it's sung by Bon Jovi. It's not him, so for the purpose of this review I'll call him Non-Jovi.

Non-Jovi sings the next song, and it includes the lyric, "George Wallace faced the Yankees down in Birmingham." Is that really something we want memorialized in song? Wallace is again name-checked in "Three Great Alabama Icons". That song is a long rambling spoken-word piece at first about how Ronnie Van Zant wasn't from Alabama, then how Non-Jovi hated football as a kid, then about George Wallace's political career. This is followed by a more traditional song about how George Wallace is in hell.

This album sure does like talking about Alabama, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Van Zants while playing E-minor chords. Around a dozen songs in I really started wondering why this album was 90 minutes long. I feel like everything Drive-By Truckers wanted to say they've said five times by this point. How many times can they do that cute little guitar noodling thing? There are really only so many tepid solos and repeated passages a guy can stand before he wants to tear his ears off.

Even my ipod lost interest in Southern Rock Opera. For no reason at all it stopped playing during the opening riff of "Life In The Factory". And I'm all like, "I know you're trying to do me a favor, but I made a pointless commitment to hear the whole album," and I turned it right back on. I was eventually treated to a dark fantasy Non-Jovi seems to have- he clearly wants to die just like Ronnie Van Zant in an airplane crash. It's hard to take the song seriously because he keeps saying he's, "Scaaaaaarrrrrred shitless," in the whiniest way possible.

Blah... 2 stars.