After delivering the best, if not the only, country concept album ever, 2001's brilliant "Southern Rock Opera," Alabama's Drive By Truckers have set a high standard for themselves and I'm happy to report that Decoration Day, (while not an attempt to best their sprawling masterpiece) is a more than worthy follow-up that is a triumph in it's own right. They've purposely aimed lower, but have perhaps hit the target even harder.

These guys make no bones about following in the footsteps of Lynyrd Skynyrd, (Skynyrd comprised much of the subject matter for Southern Rock Opera.) they are southern rockers in the most classic sense. They've lived hard, toured hard and they tell their straight-forward everyman tales of grinding-it-out in this workaday world, without a trace of pretense. Decoration Day is an event many southern religions set aside for beflowering the graves of their loved ones, and I don't know that I've ever heard darker matters addressed with such poetic candor and direct emotion, since Steve Earle's capital punishment anthem "Billy Austin."

Lead singer Patterson Hood sings in a road worn voice that bears very little drawl, in fact it has kind of a lighter Don Henley sound to it, and it can fairly be said that"Marry Me" and "Your Daddy Hates Me" bear more than a little resemblance to several earlier Eagles songs. But make no mistake, this aint Califorified stuff this is the stuff of the south, racism, incest, domestic violence, plus all of the other cliché Country themes. I don't think I've ever heard country music sound so authentic. These are lyrics on par with Cash's best and the absolute antithesis of say Garth Brooks singing about that "darned rodeo." On track 8 Hood speaks of the suicide of a good friend with lyrics such as, "You can lie to your Momma, and you can lie to your race, but you can't lie to nobody with that cold steel in your face/ And the same God you were so afraid was gonna send you to hell/ is the same one you're gonna answer to when the pin hits the shell." His compassion is real, but unforgiving ("It damned near killed me too/So I ain't gonna mourn for you").

Even more fascinating is the fact that the two guitarists contribute and sing a few of the records better tunes. Mike Cooley and Jason Isbell get in their own jabs, and between the three of them they can spin a helluva good yarn - tossing-off wizened old adages and quips like a bunch of old codgers in a small-town diner. Most of the tunes are arranged in a pretty standard fashion, though there are a few stark moments ala Steve Earle's El Corazon, and a few tripified passages that remind of My Morning Jacket. Still for the most part this is a modern day Skynyrd with traces of the Allman Brothers, Gram Parsons and The Band. The strength of this album is it's unflinching look at human nature - it looks life in it's unblinking beady little eye and offers the overriding lesson that the people we become is largely a result of the choices we make.

This aint a pretty band and the stuff they sing about is even less pretty, but I'll tell you what - Lost Highway made a huge mistake by letting these guys slip through their fingers. They're worth 5 Lucinda Williams'. And 50 Billy Bobs.