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The Badger Herald

The Student News Site of University of Wisconsin-Madison

The Badger Herald

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Country genre stigma disintigrates on album

[media-credit name=’Photo courtesy of ATO Records’ align=’alignnone’ width=’648′]GoGoBoots[/media-credit]

For more than a decade, Drive-By Truckers has been the leading band in winning contemporary music snobs over to an appreciation of country music (in principle, at least). The group of Alabamans and Georgians, with its designated alt-country, Southern rock genre tag, has straddled the gap between indie and country just enough to convince progressive young listeners that “country” isn’t a political party.

On its latest album, Go-Go Boots, Drive-By Truckers continues in its recent departure from the members’ jokey roots, further establishing themselves as serious-but-not-too-serious musical storytellers. As on the band’s last album, The Big To-Do, it delves into the darker corners of Southern American life, telling well-developed stories involving adultery, murder, desertion, insanity and the inevitable disappointment of the American dream.

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The act of murder is a central theme on the album. Several of the songs, such as “Go-Go Boots” and “The Fireplace Poker,” are murder ballads in the tradition of “Stagger Lee.” The album might draw comparisons to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads album, but while the two share similar material, the tone and delivery couldn’t be more apart.

The album alternates nicely between tracks illustrative of the group’s signature alt-country drive (as the narrative of a despondent, incendiary man on “Used to be a Cop”), and those where the “alt” has been almost entirely stripped away. On tracks like “The Weakest Man” and “Cartoon Gold,” the band (by way of the down-home familiarity of Mike Cooley’s vocals) fully embraces the conventions and storytelling capabilities of the genre.

What makes this group so consistently listenable is the sincerity with which it performs and relates its stories. The songs exemplify a keen understanding of the potentials of simple song construction. On “Pulaski” (about a young woman’s delusional dream of a westward move) and “Ray’s Automatic Weapon,” they put the lie to the lyrical simplicity and thematic superficiality often associated with country music.

A few of the tracks on Go-Go Boots, though, lack the spark that is seen in much of the band’s work and the rest of this album.

The verses of “The Thanksgiving Filter” sound like a broken record, while its refrain sounds like a heartless, generic pop-oriented ballad begging for radio time. Band members at least redeem the song and their trite ruminations on family holidays (while simultaneously reminding us they shouldn’t be taken too seriously) with the lyrics: “My aunts praise Palin, my niece loves Obama, my uncle came to dinner wearing his pajamas.”

The album’s closing number, “Mercy Buckets,” in addition to “The Thanksgiving Filter,” makes up the LP’s weakest tracks. While “The Thanksgiving Filter” is little more than generic pop-alt-rock, “Mercy Buckets” likewise seems to be the perfunctory encore, the unnecessary cymbal crash and feedback of a set’s end.

With the exception of a few tracks that seem to be little more than space fillers, the songs on Go-Go Boots lack the overwrought, cerebral intensity that defines so much of contemporary music, especially in the indie scene. While not a wholly unusual development for Drive-By Truckers as a group, Go-Go Boots perfectly represents what the band stands for.

4 stars out of 5.

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