TS: Lone Justice or Cruzados or Drivin' & Cryin' or Green On Red or Del Fuegos or Jason & The Scorchers or Long Ryders or Bodeans?

Although the first one I heard might make a better gateway--

xgau again:

The Brooklyn Side [ESD, 1994]
More raucous and pointed than such fellow Midwestern alternacountry-rockers as the Jayhawks, Uncle Tupelo, and Blood Oranges, these citizens of Festus, Missouri will hit you where you live when they lay out other people's pains and foibles--the welfare mom on Saturday night, the Sunday sports abuser, the constable with his radar gun, the local Dinosaur Jr. fan. They also speak plain truth when they criticize their car. And if they seem to relive cliches when they confess their many romantic errors, how do you think cliches get that way? (Including this one.) A-

Never had any of their albums myself, but they were pretty big with the Uncle Tupelo/Wilco/Jayhawks loving crowd in college, which makes sense since they were from not terribly far away.

Glad those bands' fans liked 'em, though actual sound/taste on record more like proto-Drive By Truckers, also kinda Great Plains (and later OH band Two Cow Garage).

Oh yeah, wasn't meant to connect them to those others necessarily, just kind of always filed them away in that whole group even if sonically they weren't that close.

I still have a CD of The Brooklyn Side (in a box in the basement where my CDs live these days). Good album iirc, tho I haven't listened to it in forever. "Welfare Music" is one I remember.

"RADAR GUN"!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpqTcGbn9r4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLMJl-ry314