Click to Listen to Drive-By Truckers' Go-Go Boots

File under "R&B murder." That's how Drive-By Truckers describe the music on their ninth studio album, a raggedy revision of classic Southern soul, complete with two Eddie Hinton covers. It's a slight shift from DBT's muscular alt-country, but the rest is familiar: great storytelling – tales of embittered ex-cops, adulterous preachers and emotionally scarred Vietnam vets – hinged to choruses that lodge in your cranium. The groove on songs like "The Thanksgiving Filter" are pure Muscle Shoals (frontman Patterson Hood's father played bass in the Muscle Shoals rhythm section), but the lyrics are hilariously 2011: "My aunt's praising Palin, and my niece loves Obama/My uncle came to dinner wearing his pajamas."

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“Ambling Alp”

The "Ambling Alp" was the nickname of the six-and-a-half-foot-tall Primo Carnera. Though the song is named after the Italian-born 1930s heavyweight champion, Yeasayer are actually paying tribute to boxing legend Joe Louis with this first-person psychedelic dance-rock tune. “I was always interested in writing a song that had boxing mythology in it,” Yeasayer’s Chris Keating said. “It’s pretty fascinating: There were so many amazing characters, and it was so closely entwined with 20th century history.” Yeaseyer also invokes German champ Max Schmeling and hints at the historical significance placed on the historic bouts between the Nazi-era boxer and the African-American Louis.