New Reviews: Drive-By Truckers, The Whigs and The Besnard Lakes

Leading this week's pack of New Reviews is The Big To-Do, the latest album from Athens, Georgia Southern rockers the Drive-By Truckers. The LP is the Truckers' first proper studio album since 2008's Brighter Than Creation's Dark, and finds Patterson Hood and pals once again combining Raymond Carver-like stories with Lynyrd Skynyrd riffs. "On the 10th album from this remarkably consistent Georgia band, a sexually abused woman murders her lover, a two-timing rogue goes missing and is hoped drowned, and, on the very pretty waltz "The Flying Wallendas," a group of acrobats take a tragic tumble," Christian Hoard writes in his three-and-a-half star review of The Big To-Do. On the album, the Truckers also bring back the powerful three-axe guitar attack that highlighted previously releases like Southern Rock Opera.

Athens, Georgia is also the hometown of another band releasing a new album this week, the Whigs, who unleash their third album In the Dark. Following a opening slot on the Kings of Leon's headlining tour, the Whigs learned a thing or two from their tourmates as the Whigs' third disc "is the sharpest distillation of its neo-college rock yet," Jon Dolan writes in his three-and-a-half star review of In the Dark. "Animal Collective producer Ben H. Allen's arty, wall-of-sound approach brightening singer-guitarist Parker Gispert's underdog anthems while rarely slowing them down."

The Besnard Lakes' second album The Bernard Lakes Are the Roaring Night also hits shelves this week. Produced using the same console as Led Zeppelin's Phyiscal Graffiti, "the Lakes' immersive second LP is a magnificently oceanic meld of Beach Boys harmonies, My Bloody Valentine tidal waves and Phil Spector girl-group siren songs shot through with soaring guitar," Will Hermes writes in his Rolling Stone review. …Are the Roaring Night earned three-and-a-half stars from RS.

For more on the biggest releases of the past few weeks, visit Rolling Stone's Album Reviews section, and check out some of the more notable recent reviews below:

• Mumford and Sons' Sigh No More
• Alkaline Trio's This Addiction
• Little Boots' Hands
• Titus Andronicus' The Monitor

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Song Stories

“Too Close”

Next | 1998

Next was formed in Minneapolis when the uncle of Terry "T-Low" and Raphael "Tweety" Brown, who was a gospel choir director, introduced the brothers to Robert Lavelle "R.L." Huggar. Sounds of Blackness singer Ann Nesby groomed the R&B group before handing them over to Naughty by Nature's KayGee, who wrote and produced "Too Close." The idea for the song was sparked "from a conversation we had with several girls at a nightclub," explained T-Low. "It's talking about the club scene, with guys getting out of hand and the female telling him to back up, asking, 'What are you doing?'" 

More Song Stories entries »

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