Fresh and familiar Drive-By Truckers’ Southern Rock BY BRETT MILANO

Three years ago, Athens’s Drive-By Truckers released an album whose very title, Southern Rock Opera, was guaranteed to earn them a stack of reviews. Although the two-disc set was really more a concept album than a rock opera (the lyrics are related, but the music of the various songs isn’t connected), its nominal theme was enough to raise eyebrows. Had someone really written a two-CD set about Lynyrd Skynyrd?

In fact, the Truckers had done something more ambitious: they’d written a two-CD set about what it means to be a Southern band, using their adolescent Skynyrd fandom as a jumping-off point. Along the way, they portrayed the late Skynyrd singer Ronnie Van Zant as a tragic hero driven by conflicted relationships with the South, with stardom, and with Neil Young. And their stab at a Skynyrd-esque guitar sound turned out more like Crazy Horse with three Neils. So their reimagined version of Skynyrd came out sounding a lot more interesting than the real one.

That album marked the Truckers’ own coming of age. On three previous indie releases, they’d been spirited enough but prone to scruffy Replacements sound-alikes and a weakness for redneck humor (some of which — like the title of their second album, Pizza Deliverance — was in fact pretty funny). With the opera, they wrote themselves into Southern rock history, so the indie-rock in-jokes weren’t going to fit. Instead, they went with a classically hell-raising guitar sound — thanks to ex-Sugar member David Barbe’s production, still a few shades punkier than anything Skynyrd ever devised — and enough serious thought to balance the cheap thrills. During the set’s one spoken section, singer/guitarist Patterson Hood ponders a couple of contradictions — George Wallace’s winning the black vote in 1982, Neil Young fan Van Zant putting Young down in "Sweet Home Alabama" — and chalks it up to "the duality of the Southern thing."

One duality they didn’t mention was that of Southern rock itself — deep and lonesome on one hand, boozy and rowdy on the other. (For evidence, they’d have only to look at their home town, which spawned both the cerebral R.E.M. and the blustery Widespread Panic). But the follow-up disc, Decoration Day (New West), captures that mix well enough to stand as the great underground roots-rock album of 2003, at once as fresh and as familiar as Wilco’s Being There felt eight years ago. Like Wilco’s disc, the Truckers’ is selective about its classic-rock references: there’s no real arena rock, and for that matter no Skynyrd. But with Barbe again producing, Decoration Day sports the best Neil Young–like guitar sound of any disc released last year, including Young’s Greendale. And the Truckers’ "Marry Me" is their equivalent of Wilco’s "Monday" — proof that, after all these years, nothing beats a really good Stones homage.

That’s the familiar part. The fresh part is the songwriting, which has turned its sympathies from doomed Southern rock bands to beautiful losers of all stripes. That means the humor has been dropped almost entirely, but its absence is no real loss: the world will always need another dark and resonant disc about jail, incest, trashed marriages, and God — all four of which figure in Decoration Day’s opener, "The Deeper In" (about a real-life brother and sister who were jailed for consensual incest). When an album opens with its slowest and starkest track, that’s the giveaway that it’s looking to be an epic. And if the lyrics are less explicitly Southern, the sound is more so. There’s steel guitar and mandolin, plus a bit of Hood’s loping family groove (his father David was the bassist in the celebrated Muscle Shoals rhythm section, whose keyboardist, Spooner Oldham, guests here). "My Sweet Annette" is about a prospective groom who marries someone else at the last minute; the song’s country-noir feel lets you know they’re not bound for glory.

Through it all, Hood sings like choked-up, peak-period Paul Westerberg with an accent, and this makes the rocker "Hell No, I Ain’t Happy" that much more of a payoff. Fueled by a guitar riff that rivals Young’s "Fuckin’ Up" for effective simplicity, it features a chorus that gets more insistent each time around before resolving with " . . . but I ain’t too crappy, no!" That’s not the most uplifting statement in the world, but it sounds downright inspirational in this context. And true to their name, Drive-By Truckers have figured out what to do when things look bleak: keep on trucking.