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This Week: Another Southern rock masterpiece, and some sounds from the rest of the world

Drive-By Truckers
Decoration Day (New West Records)

When I lived in Atlanta a few years ago, it seemed like there were dozens of bands in the Pabst Blue Ribbon set, all of them with funny names and almost-novelty songs about drinking and heartbreak and Hank Williams that drew on country music without much respect for it. God knows how many times the Drive-By Truckers played at the Star Bar when I lived half a mile from there, but I never went, put off by the name and the titles of their records, like Gangstabilly and Pizza Deliverance.

I didn't know what I'd missed until I finally listened to last year's Southern Rock Opera, an epic song cycle about growing up in the South in the 1970s. Ostensibly a tribute to Lynyrd Skynyrd, Southern Rock Opera was much more than that—deeply personal and sweepingly political, bitter and nostalgic at the same time, a defense of the South as it used to be and as it is now, with principal songwriter Patterson Hood acknowledging its faults while wearing a big chip on his shoulder. And it rocked—Southern rock without being a throwback or alt-country, sincere but self-aware—and did I mention three guitars?

Southern Rock Opera seemed to come out of nowhere, but even though its ambitious scope was a revelation, the Truckers' previous work was rock solid. The jokester album and song titles—"18 Wheels of Love," "The Night G.G. Allin Came to Town," and "Panties in Your Purse"—have hidden some of the most heartfelt American music of the last 10 years.

So the question of whether they could match Southern Rock Opera was up in the air. Had they blown their load, or had they hit a big-time groove?

The new record, Decoration Day, says the latter. There's no breakout anthem like "Let There Be Rock," but there are plenty of strong rockers—"Sink Hole," about a farmer who murders the banker who forecloses on his property; the road song "Hell No, I Ain't Happy;" and the roaring "Careless," a cauldron of three guitars and a kinetic rhythm section. There's also "Marry Me," a song that sounds more like Skynyrd than anything the band's done before, and has the classic opening line, "Well, my daddy didn't pull out, but he never apologized."

The climax of the new album is the title track, a long story song about a violent family feud that builds to a long, fiery rock-out. But the most affecting songs are "Do It Yourself," Hood's elegy to a friend who committed suicide ("Living too hard just couldn't kill you/In the end you had to do it yourself") and guitarist Mike Cooley's "Sounds Better in the Song," which takes off from Skynyrd's "Freebird" but hits a depressingly less romanticized note on the end of a relationship. "And 'Lord knows, I can't change'/ Sounds better in the song/ Than it does with hell to pay." The intimate lo-fi recording on "Sounds Better," with just Cooley, an upright bass and mournful dobro, lends the song a stark honesty that stands in contrast to the mythology of the road.

There's no way to compare Decoration Day to Southern Rock Opera. Opera was the right music at the right moment, and apparently hit a nerve with critics and new fans. Decoration Day is smaller, more introspective but equally intense, less rousing but more cutting. Its personal scale will probably mean a smaller audience, but that doesn't make it any less important a record.

—Matthew Everett

Various Artists
World 2002 (Narada)

What a fascinating and suggestive artifact. At turns rewarding and disconcerting, World 2002 consists of a two CD compilation of tunes from 24 countries, deemed by BBC DJ Charlie Gillett and his listeners as "the best music made around the world over the past 18 months." Taken together, it's a stunner, a psychic and geographic bi-polar trip, and, despite the emphasis on club music, complex.

There are the captivating selections, notably the Argentine/French Gotan Project collaboration, "Una Musica Brutal," featuring a tantalizing accordion complete with reverb, funkily syncopated. Or the strident Spanish offering, Ruibal's "Isla Mujeres," the sincerity of which serves to remind one once again to learn Spanish, but not before the tune's sonic headlock has released its grip.

And there are also the odd, such as "Tennessee Hotel" from Mali, a haunting melody, containing mumbled lyrics to the effect that "we have something that we can share with others, there is something that has interaction, that should be valued." We do? Or the Madagascaran take on "Be My Baby," sung in French no less. And for exotic there are the obligatory but nevertheless captivating Tuvan cuts, as well as "Ala Akbar," structured around a sample, complete with street noise, of the muezzin call to prayer.

It's disconcerting that so much of World 2002 is so fundamentally familiar, and not just because Simon, Byrne, Gabriel, and others have been promoting these influences for 20 plus years. Rather, it's that World 2002 represents the worldwide ubiquity of Western pop, this time transmitted back to us through the filter of 24 other cultures, enchantingly so.

—Jonathan B. Frey