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| Pitchfork |
 Drive-By Truckers' first career retrospective opens with "The Living Bubba", a standout from their 1998 debut, Gangstabilly, that tells the true story of Gregory Dean Smalley, an Atlanta musician who played hundreds of shows while he was dying of AIDS. It's a remarkable song, hard-headed and unsentimental, and singer-songwriter Patterson Hood sings his throat ragged to convey Smalley's mortal fear as well as his mortal defiance. "The Living Bubba" is more about the musician than the music, so the Truckers play those last notes almost reluctantly, as if only the song were keeping Smalley alive. As an opener, it signals both the high stakes in the band's output as well as the general subject of Ugly Buildings, Whores & Politicians: These are songs about the dedication, determination, integrity, and stubbornness it takes to be in a hard-working, hard-touring band.If the Truckers were at all cynical, or if their songs lectured about their subjects, Ugly Buildings would be unbearable. But any lessons they impart in songs like "Carl Perkins' Cadillac" (about label/artist relations) or "Outfit" (about fatherly advice) sound more like notes to themselves-- milemarkers on what Hood might call "the righteous path"-- and allow this collection to cohere into something more than a career retrospective. While the tracklist seems too short at a mere 16 songs, Ugly Buildings still attests to the breadth of the band's music, which ranges in style from gritty rock to Southern soul and ranges in subject from racial politics to recession worries ("The Righteous Path" may be the best song ever written about class distinctions). Their catalog is unique in American music, an almost literary endeavor with none of the pretensions such a description might entail. They give voice to the losers, tragic heroes, and everymen beaten down by hard circumstances, allowing each character his or her dignity. Most yuk-and-pluck alt-country bands of the 1990s would have approached a song like "Bulldozers & Dirt" from 1999's Pizza Deliverance with a smirking irony, making a joke of its white-trash subject matter. It's sung, after all, from the perspective of a man clumsily flirting with his ex's teenage daughter. Hood paints him as a real and relatable person, rather than a cornpone lecher, leaving all his contradictions intact....full text |
| Popmatters |
| Here, let’s have some fun. Put on Southern Rock Opera, the Drive-By Truckers’ breakthrough 2001 double album, and play the first few seconds of each song, like you’re sampling it on the digital listening stations of some defunct retailer. (RIP Borders.) With a couple exceptions—the drums and bass that open “Wallace”, Mike Cooley hollering “I think I’m gonna call the PO-lice!”—every song starts with guitars: noodly guitars, foreboding guitars, guitars that have trouble getting started, guitars that have a loose relationship with soul or boogie or punk riffs. DBT can do different things, but their classic sound is meditative electric guitar worship that somehow congeals into song. To paraphrase minimalist composer Morton Feldman, those six strings are their Walden. On Ugly Buildings, Whores & Politicians, an overview of their career up ‘til 2009, Drive-By Truckers are a big floppy mess, a wad of hair soaked in Sterling Bigmouth and meat juice. The rhythm section bashes out backbeat after backbeat, and the guitar riffs tend to be what other bands call “chord progressions”. There’s always some stray guitar or pedal steel wheedling over the top of everything else, a little lost stream of consciousness. Singer/songwriter/guitarists Cooley, Patterson Hood, and Jason Isbell sound like they’re discovering their songs as they go, and often as not they neglect to include a chorus. Despite their claim that Lynyrd Skynyrd is “America’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band”, the Truckers are way more Neil than Ronnie. They’re also uncommonly great—or they can be, when they don’t sacrifice their immense power and start imagining they’re in the short story business. Opera’s “Let There Be Rock” is one of their deepest and most uncanny songs; it’s rock as literature. Ostensibly a requiem for Skynyrd, who Hood never got to see live before their ‘77 plane crash, its bizarre second verse has Hood nearly drowning in his friend’s toilet, and its sublime third verse brags about all the dead musicians he did get to see live. But it wouldn’t be sublime without the band’s mighty crescendo up to Hood’s final “LET THERE BE ROCK!”, roared like a Convair engine....full text |
| Rock |
| The challenge for a band like Drive-By Truckers in making a greatest-hits collection is that they don’t have hits. A critics’ darling with a strong cult following, the Southern rock group have never made much of an impact on radio. Nonetheless, Ugly Buildings, Whores & Politicians: Greatest Hits – 1998-2009 is a pretty stellar summation of what DBT have achieved over 12 years, nicely picking many of the band’s choicest songs for a best-of that should serve as a great introduction to the uninitiated. Two Great Frontmen While Drive-By Truckers have had personnel changes over the course of the seven studio albums (and one rarities collection) that are compiled on Ugly Buildings, Whores & Politicians, the foundation of the band has always been singer-songwriters Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, who sing lead vocals on their individual tunes. While Hood remains the band’s de facto leader, Cooley’s contributions have been nearly as important, and so both men are well represented on this 16-track set, which covers these writers’ favorite subjects: snapshots of Southern culture (“Ronnie and Neil”), tales of struggling individuals (“The Righteous Path”), romantic angst (“Zip City”), and expert first-person storytelling (“Let There Be Rock”). As chroniclers of the disenfranchised -- suicide or murder is often on the minds of their narrators -- DBT have few peers, and Ugly Buildings, Whores & Politicians makes a convincing case for their legacy. An Important, Short-Lived Addition Equally welcome, the collection also notes the crucial (albeit brief) addition of songwriter Jason Isbell to the band in the mid-2000s. He has two songs on Ugly Buildings, Whores & Politicians, but while “Never Gonna Change” is a terrific foot-stomper, “Outfit” is quite possibly the best song in DBT’s canon. Originally off 2003’s Decoration Day, generally considered the band’s finest, “Outfit” is sung from a father to his son as the kid prepares to head out on the road with his rock ‘n’ roll band. Poignant and funny, the song encapsulates everything DBT do well: smart observations about human nature, a sense of character and setting, and a strong melody backed by real musical muscle. Isbell wasn’t with the band very long -- he went solo after 2006’s A Blessing and a Curse -- but his impact is definitely felt on this best-of, as well it should....full text |
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