The two horrific accidents that bookend Southern Rock Opera might differ in happenstance (the fictional car accident of “Days of Graduation” and the real-life plane crash that ended the lives of — among others — Lynyrd Skynyrd members Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines, and Cassie Gaines) but both highlight the terrible magic that Truckers frontman Patterson Hood describes as “the duality of the Southern Thing.” The Southern Thing, both the song and the idea, is a conversation many southerners have with either themselves or others about how to reconcile a rebellious and creative spirit with the South’s history of violence and racial conflict. There’s no easy answers to be had here. It’s an album of majestic three-guitar rock, songs of living lives that thrive on contradiction, and like a true opera it wrings beauty out of tragedy. 

– Alex Riggs