These songs are like the weeds in the cracks in the trailer park, or the pile of broken beer bottles in the woods, or the lipstick traces on the stubbed-out Kools overflowing the ashtray.

Oh, the things they have seen. It also bears mentioning that the Drive-By Truckers totally rock - more specifically, they rock in that sweet spot where Lynyrd meets Skynyrd. That was the case Thursday night at the Fillmore at the TLA, where the Truckers put on a barn-burning, two-hour hoedown of Southern-fried rock for a rowdy, sold-out crowd.

The Truckers have two main singer-songwriter-guitarists these days: Patterson Hood, burly and bearded, whose voice sounds alternately like Neil Young and Don Henley, and Mike Cooley, a tall drink of water who bears a passing resemblance to Townes Van Zandt, and sings like a honky-tonk Mick Jagger. It goes without saying that both these men totally shred as axmen. Providing crunchy Telecaster reinforcement and gorgeous pedal-steel atmospherics was the third guitarist, John Neff.

Anchoring this rambunctious crew was drummer Brad Morgan, who looks like Allen Ginsberg and never left the pocket, and bassist Shonna Tucker, who looks like she was plucked from behind a diner counter but is clearly acquainted with the idea that great bass players should be felt - preferably right in the chest - and not heard.

And just for added Southern gentleman gravitas, legendary sideman Spooner Oldham is playing keyboards on this tour.

The Truckers are supporting the new and thoroughly twangtastic Brighter Than Creation's Dark, which was generously essayed Thursday night. I prefer Cooley's songs - not to mention his twangy snarl and dead eye for dark, pulpy detail - and "Lisa's Birthday," "Self Destructive Zones" and "3 Dimes Down" did not disappoint.

Which is not to say that Hood's "Daddy Needs a Drink" and "The Righteous Path" didn't also see the world through the glass darkly. In fact, Hood's ode to the lowlife, "The Company I Keep," was one of the showstoppers. The other was, appropriately enough, right at the end and, like all of the Truckers' best songs, it documents the extraordinary wreckage of ordinary lives. It's a fairly astonishing song called "Puttin' People on the Moon," sung by Hood in the first person, about an Alabama Wal-Mart clerk forced to sell dope to pay for his wife's chemotherapy.

Opening act - and fellow Athens, Ga., residents - the Whigs stoked the crowd with a loud, raucous, and thoroughly impressive set that had all the hair-on-fire urgency and last-ditch desperation of the characters in the Truckers' best songs.