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CRITIC REVIEWS
100
The most important rock'n'roll album of 2016 is also likely the most important rock'n'roll album of the past decade. American Band is not to be missed.
90
Eloquently plainspoken as ever about the pressing issues we face as a nation, they've made an album multiple decades into their career that establishes them as more directly relevant than ever.
90
"American Band" is Drive-By Truckers' eleventh record and, while it couldn't be by any other band, in many ways, it's an outlier.
83
While the no-bullshit lyrics and get-in, get-out nature of American Band work to make the band’s politics perfectly clear (at 47 minutes, it’s a contender for DBT’s shortest LP), it still has unique lyrical details that separate it from other protest music, even protest music of the loud and pissed-off variety.
80
Taken as a whole, American Band is the group’s most thematically coherent work since their pinnacle of Jason Isbell-assisted records in the early 2000s.
80
American Band's force comes from its unflinching exploration of what it means to be American in 2016 and its assertion that questioning the status quo is necessary for the country to survive and thrive.
80
American Band is an op-ed column with guitars, and it presents a message well worth hearing, both as politics and as music.
80
It's political rock that never confuses passionate commitment with smug certainty, asking more questions than it answers on a hero's journey into our darkest national impulses, and maybe in some small way, beyond them.
80
American Band feels like a statement album: not for the Drive-By Truckers, but for all of us. Perhaps no album released this year paints a more accurate depiction of the social and moral crises facing America during this tumultuously violent and highly contentious 2016.
78
The songs on American Band, for the most part, are well constructed, catchy-enough tunes that don’t quite rise into the first rank of the group’s deep and impressive catalog.
70
American Band sends Southern soul to hell and back; Drive-By Truckers urge and sweat a better American et cetera. We are bigger than our borders.
Every time DBT releases a new album, I tune in, and remember why I don't ever re-listen to their songs. I'm down with the lyrical content, but I can't get past how boring the overall experience is. Maybe next time.
A deceptively 'simple' approach.
Honest music, honest lyrics, honest sentiment...but in the grand tradition of the Dylan's, Young's and Springsteen's of yesteryear this had a rare sort of integrity. Plus it rocks.
Honest music, honest lyrics, honest sentiment...but in the grand tradition of the Dylan's, Young's and Springsteen's of yesteryear this had a rare sort of integrity. Plus it rocks.
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Year End Lists
| #5 | / | Diffuser |
| #7 | / | American Songwriter |
| #8 | / | Sound Opinions |
| #10 | / | God Is In The TV |
| #11 | / | Magnet |
| #13 | / | Uncut |
| #14 | / | NPR Music |
| #17 | / | Spectrum Culture |
| #18 | / | PopMatters |
| #19 | / | Slant Magazine |
More Lists
MISC LISTS
| #4 | / | Rolling Stone (Country) |
| / | The Music Fix |
Track List
- Ramon Casiano
- Darkened Flags on the Cusp of Dawn
- Surrender Under Protest
- Guns of Umpqua
- Filthy and Fried
- Sun Don't Shine
- Kinky Hypocrite
- Ever South
- What It Means
- Once They Banned Imagine
- Baggage
In Library (26)
Added on: June 21, 2016
