Lee Bains III Serves Up Southern Rock With Punk’s Raw Energy

His new album “Youth Detention” sizzles with excitement.

Lee Bains III + The Glory Fires

Youth Detention (Nail My Feet Down to the Southside of Town)

Don Giovanni Records

Don Giovanni Records

When six of the tracks on an album have titles ending in an exclamation point, you might suspect that the performer is a tad excitable, which is definitely the case with the electrifying third outing of Lee Bains III. Ripping through his songs like the rowdier little brother of the dudes in Drive-By Truckers, this Birmingham, Alabama native infuses crunchy Southern rock with strong shots of punk’s raw energy and rap’s attention to words. “I Can Change!,” “I Heard God!,” “Black & White Boys” and other incendiary tunes supply a jolt of purifying righteous noise, but also offer plenty of food for thought, touching on issues of race, class and other difficult subjects without resorting to glib generalities. Incorporating a sound clip from a 2016 Black Lives Matter rally and accompanied by a reading list (Angela Davis, Allen Ginsberg, Jean-Paul Sartre, et al.), this 17-track, nearly hour-long epic is exhilarating, exhausting and well worth checking out!

DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do things differently in the aftermath of a political crisis: Watergate. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after, and go deep on, stories others don’t. And we’re a nonprofit newsroom because we knew corporations and billionaires would never fund the journalism we do. Our reporting makes a difference in policies and people’s lives changed.

And we need your support like never before to vigorously fight back against the existential threats American democracy and journalism face. We’re running behind our online fundraising targets and urgently need all hands on deck right now. We can’t afford to come up short—we have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

Please help with a donation today if you can—even just a few bucks helps. Not ready to donate but interested in our work? Sign up for our Daily newsletter to stay well-informed—and see what makes our people-powered, not profit-driven, journalism special.

payment methods

DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do things differently in the aftermath of a political crisis: Watergate. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after, and go deep on, stories others don’t. And we’re a nonprofit newsroom because we knew corporations and billionaires would never fund the journalism we do. Our reporting makes a difference in policies and people’s lives changed.

And we need your support like never before to vigorously fight back against the existential threats American democracy and journalism face. We’re running behind our online fundraising targets and urgently need all hands on deck right now. We can’t afford to come up short—we have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

Please help with a donation today if you can—even just a few bucks helps. Not ready to donate but interested in our work? Sign up for our Daily newsletter to stay well-informed—and see what makes our people-powered, not profit-driven, journalism special.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate