Eight Albums that Will Restore Your Faith in Contemporary Music

8. Drive By Truckers - Pizza Deliverance

Despite what Toby Keith may have you believe, there is more to southern culture than drinking beer, driving trucks, and talking about how awesome it is to drink beer and drive trucks.

There is a dark side to drunken mudbogging and other aspects of southern culture, and no band captures that dark side better than the Drive-By Truckers. Pizza Deliverance is the band's most candid assessment of the underbelly of life in the deep south.

Whether he's singing about killing his family and roommate ("One each for my immediate family/They'd be so disappointed to see what I'd done/One left over I'll save it for my roommate/After all, it's my roommate's gun") or mocking the Christian establishment ("Stop that dope smoking, stop that masturbation/take the lord into your heart and stop that fornication/we're building us an army gonna knock out Satan/Visa or mastercard, our operators are waiting"), Patterson Hood delivers his lyrics with conviction and, most importantly, heart.

In a word...gritty.

Why this is an important album: Pizza Deliverance is rough, dark, oddly inspiring...and it offers a meaningful perspective of the south that sits at the opposite end of the table from the romanticized portrait painted by many mainstream country 'artists.'

7. Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes

The most serene music to come out of Seattle since...well, folks in the Queen City started producing and releasing music. "But wait!" you scream at me, tossing your copy of Fleet Foxes debut album Fleet Foxes to the carpet, "There's no angst! No distorted guitars! No suicidal lyrics! Are you sure these guys are from Seattle?"

Indeed they are, but your skepticism is warranted. Fleet Foxes are only from Seattle in the geographical sense. Musically, they hail from somewhere much more divine and a lot less cloudy. Like Heaven. Or Tazewell, Virginia. Many have made the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young comparison and I think that's fair. The one extremely abstract difference I will try to draw between the two bands is this: CSNY's music is atmospheric, but it still sounds 'worldly,' if you will...like walking down a winding, isolated country path surrounded by vegetation on all sides, when all of a sudden the trees end, revealing a burning red sun illuminating the clouds along the entire horizon line. Fleet Foxes is like walking down that same path, but instead of reaching a sunset you are greeted by four beautiful angels who lift you off your feet and send you floating over the valley. In no way is that a shot at CSNY...Fleet Foxes just make it seem that effortless.

In a word...cosy.

Why this is an important album: Fleet Foxes is authentic as it comes and easily one of the best folk albums in recent memory. Take this quote from front man Robin Pecknold from the inner flap of the band's EP Sun Giant. It sums up the sound of this album better than I ever could:

"Sometimes, when driving, or riding the bus, or walking around in some park, I will try to get an image in my head of what the land around me would have looked like 400 years ago. The same hills, the same landscape, but in my mind I'll cover it in nothing and wonder what it was like to be the first man to chance upon it."

6. M. Ward - Post-War

5. Air- Moon Safari


4. Badly Drawn Boy - Hour of the Bewilderbeast


3. Modest Mouse - The Lonesome Crowded West

If you don't dig the initial wobbling, drunken guitar riff that opens this album, it's likely you'll absolutely despise the rest of The Lonesome Crowded West.

If you do dig it, you're in luck - the rest of the album sounds just as intoxicated. And, like most drunks, it's loud, sloppy, rambling, frank, and passionate...and I use those adjectives in the most flattering way possible. Frontman Isaac Brock rambles about rednecks, guns, alcohol, Jesus, drugs, drunk dialing, the afterlife, and a slew of other topics with overflowing angst comparable to another Seattle-area music legend (You know, that blonde haired guy that started a band that changed the face of rock forever?). Brock's original lyrics and authenticity keep the album from faceplanting into contrivity. Point in case: the chorus for the song "Polar Opposites" ("I'm trying to drink away the part of the day that I cannot sleep away.") would

2. Nirvana - In Utero


1. Radiohead - OK Computer


Honorable Mention
Boards of Canada - Music Has the Right to Children
Tortoise - TNT
Mogwai - The Hawk is Howling