Whiskeytown

These whiskey-swilling North Carolina boys brought together the rash fury of punk with the outsider braininess of indie rock and fused them both with the sensibility of classic country -- loping, alienated, spare. In keeping with the punk ethos, Faithless Street is a beautiful mess; it has an immediacy of purpose that blows a fresh wind through with increasingly polished notions of country music. The plangent violin on "Drunk Like a River" and the hard-luck stories of, well, "Hard Luck Story" and "Mining Town" couldn't be more roadhouse rock, but the improvisatory feel and startlingly direct voice of singer/songwriter Ryan Adams made the album sound like nothing else. The band expanded on Stranger's Almanac, and Adams' tendencies to pretentious meandering came to the fore. It's still an impressive effort, but the unnecessarily eclectic instrumentation and chunky horn section weigh down the slow, rambling songs. The itchy feet that would eventually send Adams to embark on a successful solo career in which he could be in love with his own voice full-time are apparent in Pneumonia, a cluttered, soporific, and altogether disappointing album from a band bursting with early promise. The rerelease of Faithless Street includes nine "previously unavailable" tracks. (ARION BERGER)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide