Thursday, November 11

The Drive-By Truckers keep getting better at giving the characters in their hard-luck yarns a sense of setting. The Dirty South, their latest full-length, is rich with swampy three-guitar sludge and open-interstate jangle and harmony vocals like two people yelling at each other from different rooms. Onstage, though, the band dials down that active nuance to better give those characters the release they so rarely receive; expect the three-guitar sludge to metamorphose into a three-guitar jet engine. And expect to hang around for a while: Last time I caught 'em, the Truckers played an encore longer than many acts' entire sets.