Hailed by fans as a return to the true grit of their form, Brighter Than Creation's Dark boasts some of Drive-By Truckers' best songwriting to date. This was not expected, partly because guitar player and co-songwriter Jason Isbell quit the band in the spring of 2007. New full-time member Jon Neff rounds out the sound with his own tone, his pedal steel helping to unravel a gripping ghost story on "Two Daughters And A Beautiful Wife," the album's opener. "The Righteous Path" is a fist-pumping country rocker that unapologetically leans hard on a heavily distorted Crazy Horse crunch, sounding like the bastard child of Neil Young's "Rockin' In The Free World." But the urgency behind Patterson Hood's voice and the story of a regular American guy trying to hold together the pieces of a crumbling patriotic ideal make this one an apt sequel to Young's 1989 anthem. "The Purgatory Line" is a haunting, slowing pulse of a song where bass player Shona Tucker coos like a heartbroken and heavy-lidded Neko Case.