The Siege of Nashville

Hancock's retro mentality will no doubt please a good portion of alienated honky-tonkers, but the ragtag artists on Bloodshot Records have found a better way to revive the legacy of Hank Williams. "We come to exhume Hank, not to canonize him," reads the mission statement on the cover of Hell-Bent, the Chicago label's second collection of what they call insurgent country. "Unbury him not from the ground . . . but from beneath the mounds of gutless swill which pass for his legacy, the suffocating spew of the Nashville hit factories." In the process, the Bloodshot stable shatters the conventions of the city by exploring the music's darkest corners; Hell-Bent wallows in the seedy side of country, from the trailer-park casualty in the Starkweathers' "Little White Trash Boy" to Robby Fulks's "She Took a Lot of Pills (and Died)."

Free of any mainstream constraints and concessions, the Bloodshot artists shy away from country's tried-and-true sounds and stories. Instead they offer doom-laden folk dirges such as Richard Buckner's "22" and the string-band racket of Moonshine Willy. It's a brilliant, daring collection, but even better is the Bloodshot release of . . . To the Last Dead Cowboy, the debut album by the Waco Brothers. Comprising members of the Bottle Rockets, indie-rock noisemakers Wreck, and punk survivors the Mekons, the Wacos are supreme pessimists who open the album with a toast to the Devil and his cockroaches ("Too Sweet to Die"), swim in the cesspool of American history ("Bad Times Are Comin' Round Again"), and spin yarns about losers who can't seem to change their miserable lives ("Harm's Way").

With Jon Langford's thick Northern England accent and a ramshackle delivery that harks back to the primitive sound of late-Seventies postpunk, the Waco Brothers will most surely never find a spot on TNN, nor will the transformers of country radio bounce the band's tunes from signal to signal. And they would probably rough up the ears of Jim Lauderdale's handful of listeners. But they and the other members of the Bloodshot posse draw inspiration from the same deep well, where seemingly disparate ideas are linked by a determination to blast the foundation of country's complacent musical capital. Nashville, of course, will never crumble; it has reigned victorious through countless attacks by dissidents. The rebellion, however, struggles on.