The Complete Dirty South

The Complete Dirty South

The shock of this director’s-cut-style expansion of 2004’s classic The Dirty South isn’t its anger so much as how specific and well-calibrated that anger still feels. Thematically, the anchor is the idea that the spoils of those we call heroes—whether musicians (“Carl Perkins’ Cadillac”), outlaws (“Cottonseed”), veterans (“The Sands of Iwo Jima”), or activists (“The Day John Henry Died,” written by a young Jason Isbell)—pale in comparison to the masters, government agencies, and multinationals that exploit them. And those we call losers often die with nothing but credit-card debt and a song (“Puttin’ People on the Moon,” “Lookout Mountain”). As realists, the band knows it isn’t much, but as artists, they know it’s all they have. And so, with strained voices, crudely approximated Skynyrd licks, and a sense of class-driven frustration more akin to rap than classic Southern rock, they give it until they can’t give any more.

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