As guys wrestle with the encroaching responsibilities of work and family, they still often romanticize or cling to their shit-kicking youth; the Drive-By Truckers' principal songwriters, Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, represent each side of this coin. Using the broadest strokes imaginable, gravelly and grizzly Hood is the endlessly vigilant, fiercely protective papa bear, while laconic slick-talker Cooley the hell-raising, yarn-spinning fuck-up.

There's always been plenty of wiggle room on either side, of course (Cooley's tensely domestic "Loaded Gun in the Closet", Hood's ball-busting "Aftermath USA"), but with the departure of talented third songwriter Jason Isbell, DBT's two founding members solidify their positions within the group on its seventh studio album, Brighter Than Creation's Dark. What at first blush might sound like unhealthy entrenchment turns out to be a brilliant study in duality, as Cooley and Hood-- seemingly in conversation with one another-- weigh the respective pulls of decadence and dependability.

The more conventional, traditional Cooley may not win as many critical plaudits as the idiosyncratic Hood, but he's outclassed his comrade over the group's last two, uneven records, contributing gems like "Where the Devil Don't Stay" and "Space City" while Hood was busy handing out self-help bromides. A tougher, smarter, funnier version of the prototypical alt-country gunslinger, Cooley's in rare wise-cracking form this time around, unspooling quick-witted, sin-soaked vignettes of colorful loners and losers that hearken back to DBT's pre-Southern Rock Opera incarnation as supreme underground redneck jokesters. "Bob" and "Lisa's Birthday" are both superbly funny character sketches (sorry, no Leon Kompowski cameo on the latter), while "Self Destructive Zones" offers a head-spinning, sardonically knowing tour of the past 20 years of angst-rock. But Cooley's most welcome contribution might be the blistering "3 Dimes Down", a loose-limbed groover from a story-centric band that's too often a lumbering musical beast.

While brother-in-arms Cooley tosses off seemingly effortless odes to fast cars and booze-fueled loving, Hood is still busy being the Tony Soprano of southern rock, an imposing man's man who nonetheless opens up his rawest emotional wounds for inspection. Bathos may have burdened much of his songwriting post-SRO, but Hood sounds reborn here thanks to a newly crystallized focus-- fatherhood. In a less emotionally seasoned songwriter's hands such frequent invocations of dads and kids might seem like a gimmick, but Hood has long been amused, compelled, and inspired by the family, going back to "Zoloft", "Sink Hole", and the immortal "The Southern Thing". Here though, Hood's hearth-honed eye is specifically trained on children, the ones we try to support and protect ("The Righteous Path", "Goode's Field Road"), and the ones we sometimes tragically leave behind. Such is the self-excoriating scenario that drives the war-themed "That Man I Shot", wherein our protagonist kills an enemy combatant and can't help wondering about the little ones he may have rendered fatherless. That emotional crescendo is followed closely by the similarly pained "The Home Front", which tautly conveys the worry of a wife and mother waiting for her man to come back from battle.

It's a mostly harrowing cycle that Hood has woven in the midst of Cooley's debauched ditties (with first-time frontwoman Shonna Tucker striking an equitable balance with her three appropriately gritty but generically sung contributions), but it's not all fatherly hand-wringing, thanks at least to the succinctly-phrased ode to decompression, "Daddy Needs a Drink". Irresponsible rabble-rouser or put-upon parent, that's a sentiment every grown-ass man can appreciate.