It would be pretty easy to think of Drive-By Truckers as a simple Southern rock band singing songs about simple folks from the South.

But, there is nothing inherently "simple" about this music.

On "Brighter Than Creation's Dark," a 19-track opus released in January, Drive-By Truckers continue to probe the lives and misadventures of the backwoods misfits, rebels, drunks, junkies and hapless losers that populated the group's records for nearly a decade.

If you first visited the Truckers on 2001's double-disc tour de force "Southern Rock Opera," you'll recognize the shades of Lynyrd Skynyrd, Georgia Satellites and "Exile on Main St." era Rolling Stones and maybe even some southern-fried Wilco. You'll also notice more mature and nuanced songwriting.

Though the titles seem pretty straightforward -- "Daddy Needs a Drink," "You and Your Crystal Meth," "Two Daughters and a Pretty Wife," and "The Man I Shot" -- the stories conjure visions of William Faulkner or Flannery O'Connor set to fuzz guitars.

The band brings its "Home Front' tour to Milwaukee Thursday night at The Pabst Theater with the Felice Brothers, who could probably draw an enthusiastic crowd as a headliner, opening the show at 8 p.m.

"Brighter Than Creation's Dark" will be regarded as a landmark album for the Truckers because it is the first since guitarist / songwriter Jason Isbell left the band for a solo career.

Guitarists Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley still handle much of the songwriting and dictate the musical direction of the band. Hood's songs, delivered with a distinct rasp, tend toward the folky side, Cooley's are more countrified. Both men, however, populate their songs with dark characters from the "Dirty South."

Isbell's departure paved the way for the Truckers to feature bassist Shonna Tucker, who wrote three of the songs on the album, and Jon Neff, a multi-instrumentalist / utility man whose role in the band is similar to what Scott Thurston brings to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Neff switches between pedal steel and guitar and provides a musical foil for Hood and Cooley, the main guitarists and songwriters for the band.

"Inter-connected themes explored by three different writers (with three very different points of view) has always been a hallmark of what sets our band apart," Hood writes in a letter posted on the band's Web site.

"This album might even take all of that to the next level, as this is by far our most eclectic, yet cohesive album ever. Brad Morgan gets an extra kudos here for being the first-take king and the glue that holds all these crazy elements together.

"In the end, we ended up with 19 songs. Nine by me, three by Shonna, and seven by Cooley. Stylistically, they run the gamut from old-timey sounding country to a heavy R&B influence. Some songs that are quieter than any we've ever recorded and some that rock harder than anything we've ever done. In the end it's still all rock and roll (which is why that will always be the description of choice to us when describing our music in stylistic terms). Finished, sequenced, even mixed and we still had no title for the album.

"As a band famous for our sometimes hard-fighting ways, we managed to make this album without so much as a single creative disagreement. They say that the best art is often born of adversity and there was plenty leading up to the writing of the songs, but the actual recording process was a marvel of united purpose and inspiration. Then it came time to name the thing and we couldn't agree on anything. No heated battles, just a comedy of errors as each potential title would get 2-3 votes. Every decision had been unanimous and we wanted the title to be also but there was always a dissenting vote.

"In the end we went with 'Brighter Than Creation's Dark,' which came from a line in Cooley's song 'Checkout Time in Vegas' and to me made an apt description of the music we had made. Don't think we ever got that unanimous vote, but ran out of time and had to name it something."