A casual listen to CivilWarLand, the new album by Dead Soldiers, might lead one to think they’re singing about the travails specific to life in the American South. This is a fine old musical tradition, from masterpieces like “Strange Fruit” and its “scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh” to The Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” to Neighborhood Texture Jam’s “Old South,” consigning Confederate flags to Nazi museums in the last gasp of the ’80s.

So, launching into the first single and title track, “CivilWarLand,” listeners who know that variety of song will feel an instant kinship with a band that pairs the grim realities of the “Southern travail” song with a farfisa/horn-fueled, carnivalesque relish reminiscent of Tom Waits. It is very much a song and a sound directed to the haunted lands around Memphis.

“What once ran red with glory is now covered in rust
Stonewall ain’t comin’ back baby, the cause is just lost.
Still fightin’ for the wrong side of the Mason-Dixon Line,
Oh CivilWarLand is in bad decline…”

All of this is delivered with the warm, organic, driving sounds of Dead Soldiers, the band. Because they’ve carried on with pretty much the same lineup since their beginnings nearly a decade ago, it can be easy to take their combination of talents for granted, that combination being Michael Jasud (vocals, guitar), Ben Aviotti (vocals, guitar, lap steel), Clay Qualls (vocals, bass), Krista Wroten (vocals, violin, mandolin), Nathan Raab (piano, keys, pump organ), Paul Gilliam (drums), Victor Sawyer (trombone, tuba), and Tom Link (saxophone).

The opening track alone features the group’s sheer musicianship with successively more unhinged horn solos that build to one of the greatest sonic freak outs in rock history. And throughout the album, Krista Lynne Wroten’s fills and inventive string parts add a humanizing poignance to every arrangement.

Then one must factor in what the band calls their “songs about anxiety, poverty, politics, history and death … lifted by three and four part vocal harmonies.” Those harmonies are yet another part of the Dead Soldiers arsenal. And the potential for variety inherent in all these players and voices is fully realized on their latest album. They’re capable of many stylistic turns, all working to further enrich the world building that is CivilWarLand.

All those other flavors of songcraft burst from the speakers in rapid succession There’s the Jayhawks-meet-Tom Petty of “Time To Kill,” which is really about finding time to live even while “We’re all just waiting for the bubble to burst/For things to get worse.”

The shadowy Old World noir of “Cry to Keep from Laughing” that follows starts with a setting for piano and strings, then adds more of the players until the horns collectively wail for us all.

By song four, the balladry of “Train Song,” steeped in the New Mexican landscape, with a character about to “tattoo my face,” it’s clear that CivilWarLand is not a past plagued with the likes of Stonewall Jackson, but a full fledged world going on around us now. That’s the sound of Dead Soldiers catching up with reality, with “every godforsaken town I’ve been in,” (cue epic guitar solo), and showing us the world we now inhabit by rebuilding it in front of our eyes. Before long, we’re caught in the galloping rock of destiny and the chilling irony of “Men Like Me”:

“Well I held her down and told her, ‘This is what is love’/Well I flew over Afghanistan, rained fire from above/Well they told me, ‘Take no prisoners,’ so I threw her in the sea/And they showed up handing medals out to men like me.”

Men like that walk through CivilWarLand with impunity. Indeed, listening through this album’s many moods, by turns brooding and rollicking, I was reminded of the book How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America, by Heather Cox Richardson. While the opening track may invoke the “literal” Civil War and the particular Southern lands stained by that struggle’s blood, as the album plays on the band zooms out to a world where those same conflicts dominate the continent, if not all the globe.

Then the band zooms in again, to a singer who’ll “promise that I really do love you/But it’s so hard to prove/When I’m not around,” weaving the personal with the political, all of it darkened by the pall of the first song’s grim message: “The past is never dead/Its vulture’s pickin’ out our eyes.”

Dead Soldiers celebrate the release of CivilWarLand with a live show at Crosstown Theater this Saturday, October 25th, at 7:30 p.m. With Blvck Hippie.