Roadrunner

Southern rock progenitors Lynyrd Skynyrd have finally crafted an album that can stand up to the band’s early canon, back when founding lead singer Ronnie Van Zant penned songs of uncommon depth and perception that showed the trajectory from ruin to redemption in the complicated souls of life beneath the Mason Dixon line. Now, 35 years after Skynyrd’s twin-engine Corvar fell out of a Mississippi sky, Van Zants’s younger brother Johnny – who has fronted the reconstituted band since 1987 – has finally let go of his older brother’s pugnacious ambitions and aspirations and found his own, authentic voice on Last of a Dying Breed. Over these 11-songs, this latest version of Skynyrd – which now includes former Black Crowe bassist Johnny Colt – exposes another version of the Southern ethos that is more traditional, reactionary and unabashedly sentimental in its acceptance of what it means to be a Southern man, and less about fighting against it. There is something strangely ennobling about accepting human hardship, the good book and even a blousy-sipping woman who, “like an old blues song stuck in my head,” portrays things the way they are instead of the way we want them to be.