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7 / 10 For 12 years now, Athens, Georgia’s Drive-By Truckers have been conjuring up a vivid world in which the swamps are choked with the victims of psychopaths, the local whores are shrinks and booze turns livers into leather. But never have Patterson Hood’s five-piece sounded quite so cranky and furiously righteous as they do on this terrific, ear-splitting sprawl of shit-kicking country boogie. Powered by a three-axe onslaught of shirt-billowing riffs – the sort J Mascis would give his greying locks for – this is the gnarly, heads-down sound of survival and when they growl “there was damage done but I made it home, woke up on the floor” (on ‘The Fourth Night Of My Drinking’) it sounds like they know their subject matter well.

Chris Parkin

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