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Drive By Truckers perform "Feb. 14"

It’s about as pure as you can get it.

Call it the quintessential rock and roll powerhouse: A bass, drums and no less than three distinctive guitars. That’s what the Drive-By Truckers are all about, teeming with a charged sound led by those three unique guitars. This acclaimed Athens, GA outfit has craftily sewn southern rock appendages onto a punk torso to create a brutally genuine, agitated, and honest rock and roll Frankenstein. And while that’s a good start, it’s only scratching the surface. The beauty is the beast’s brain.

The underlying greatness of this band has consistently been in the storytelling. What really drives the Truckers is the ability to weave a good yarn. Those guitars have voices behind them, too. Since the band’s start, when singer/guitarists Mike Cooley and Patterson Hood forged a personal bond though punk rock, the Truckers have made it their trademark to tell tales that are sometimes gruesome and other times hilarious, about everything from an abused woman in harsh denial on “Wifebeater” (from 1998’s Gangstabilly) to reflections on a feces-flinging punk legend in “The Night G.G. Allin Came To Town” (from 1999’s Pizza Deliverance.)

It was with Southern Rock Opera that the band truly made it’s mark. The 2001 grand double album was based loosely around the flaming rise and—quite literally—equally flaming crash of Lynyrd Skynyrd. It chronicled the cultural good, bad and ugly from below the Mason Dixon line, or as Hood called it, “the duality of the Southern Thing.” Hood and Cooley led the charge of this harrowing epic of rock and roll under a flag of stars and bars, playing like a taste of Southern gothic worthy of Faulkner but with an impassioned, explosive delivery that’s straight up Bon Scott (who the song “Let There Be Rock” is partly about).

By the time of 2003’s solid follow up, the chilling song cycle Decoration Day, a new third guitar was in the hands of a baby-faced kid named Jason Isbell, who immediately proved that he could stand side by side with Cooley and Patterson—not only as a guitarist but also as a key component and singer/songwriter, contributing to the redemptive tale “Outfit.”

With 2004’s The Dirty South including the crackling rhythm section of bassist Shona Tucker and drummer Brad Morgan, the band had found its ultimate lineup. Still, there was some wonder if the Truckers were going to be able to keep it up. There were whisperings and stories that the band was crumbling amid the usual mix of infighting, booze and drugs, and of course that good ol’ rock and roll classic: Burnout. Could the Truckers keep doing it?

The release of A Blessing And A Curse (New West Records) in April took any notions that the band was ready to wrap it up and blew them out of the water right along with the blasting opening chords and the sound of the thrown flower vase on the explosive first track “Feb 14.”

The reflexive impulse would be to put A Blessing And A Curse in with the others, as part of the Truckers’ ongoing investigation behind the thicket and brush of Dixie, what with the emblematic Wes Freed artwork that has gloriously emblazoned the group’s previous releases. This release is less a triptych of deep southern Americana than a radiant and astute pastiche of songs a la Exile On Main Street, largely written in the studio and connecting cohesively as an album without a tying theme. Aside from the apt Stones reference, it’s clear that along the way the Truckers have morphed into a modern equivalent of The Band: Three diverse songwriting voices who each take turns with stinging perfection. Hood’s “Aftermath USA” is a loose Faces-style romp chronicling a less than blissful domestic situation. Jason Isbell’s “Daylight” is the most un-Truckers piece on the record but could also be the best, conjuring a blissful yet bittersweet taste of pop reflecting a touch of 1970s AM radio. Cooley makes a one-eighty from his usual ragged, boozy territory with the tender acoustic ballad “Space City.”

Hood asks at one point, “Is that how yer gonna write yer story?” A Blessing and A Curse shows the DBTs are thankfully continuing to write theirs their own way. Fuck whether or not the South ever does: The Drive-By Truckers have risen again!

Drive-By Truckers play Thursday at The Square next Thursday, July 27 with Robert Randolph and the Family Band.