“The Dirty South”, perhaps the best album by the American band Drive-By Truckers, appears this week in a new and to a limited extent polished version, which especially underlines the greatness of the album.
It is a great body of work that the American band Drive-By Truckers has to its name. It’s very difficult for me to choose between a huge pile of beautiful albums, but the albums with Jason Isbell stand out very carefully. “The Dirty South” from 2004 is one of these albums and it is an album that will be released this week in a slightly more extensive version, which also features a new mix and new vocals here and there. The differences are certainly not huge, but “The Complete Dirty South” is certainly no less than the original album, if only because of an extra track by Jason Isbell and the beautiful packaging. An undisputed classic in a subtle new look.
The American band Drive-By Truckers released two undisputed annual albums in 2020 with “The Unraveling” and “The New OK”. Since then, the band from Athens, Georgia, has slowed down a bit, although the somewhat underrated “Welcome 2 Club XIII” was released last year. That album may not be counted among the Drive-By Truckers classics, but that says more about the quality of the band’s complete oeuvre than about the quality of the album that was last until recently.
Drive-By Truckers began making classics in 2001, when the landmark “Southern Rock Opera” appeared. The ode to the Southern Rock of yesteryear convinced for an hour and a half and was the start of a glittering career. Drive-By Truckers now has an impressive pile of great albums to her name. These are albums that are very difficult for me to choose between, but today I choose “The Dirty South” from 2004 for several reasons.
“The Dirty South” is the second and final album on which Jason Isbell is part of the band, is the best-selling album of the American band, is the album that is considered by many to be the band’s best album and it is the album that has been released this week in a new version, “The Complete Dirty South“. “The Dirty South” celebrates its twentieth anniversary next year, but the version released this week is more than a 20th Anniversary Edition.
The band re-recorded the album for a small part, provided the songs with a new mix, messed around with the order and also added a number of songs to the new version of the album. Frontman Patterson Hood indicates that “The Complete Dirty South” sounds like the album was intended in 2004, but that didn’t immediately convince me. Reinventing old work is usually a fairly pointless activity and almost always the new version is less than the original, although there are exceptions.
The Dirty South had 2004 tracks and 14 minutes of music in 70. The new version adds three more tracks and more than fifteen minutes of music. Upon listening to “The Complete Dirty South”, my original skepticism slowly but surely appeared. Fortunately, the new version of the album doesn’t sound very different from the original. The new mix is perhaps just a bit better and the same goes for the re-sung vocals in a limited number of tracks.
Also, the limited sliding in the order of the tracks does not have much influence on the album, leaving the new tracks as the greatest asset. In particular, the TVA written by Jason Isbell is beautiful and is enough reason for me to switch to the new version of “The Dirty South“. The new edition is also beautifully packaged and provided with an informative booklet.
It could easily have been part of a deluxe edition of the album, but Patterson Hood wanted to shake off the frustration of a record company opposing at the time with this new version of the album. “The Complete Dirty South” is a beautifully executed and beautiful sounding album, but it is above all an album that shows how good and memorable the original album was in 2004. “The Complete Dirty South” is ultimately a more than nice snack, which definitely makes you look forward to new work from the band from Georgia, but which will come out of the speakers very often.
“This ‘Director’s Cut’ is the way it was always intended to be heard” – Patterson Hood
released June 16th, 2023
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