Afghan Whigs

Too alt-identified (or complicated) for the mainstream, too straightforward (or cock-rockish) for many indie lifers, the Afghan Whigs never found the mass audience to which their cinematic, oddly addictive soul-rock infernos aspired. Much of the admiration they did inspire centered on frontman Greg Dulli, an inspirationally pudgy, manic-depressive cad who would have creeped out Don Giovanni. Dulli’s a Catholic boy blessed with a filmmaker’s sense of story, a robust, overly industrious voice that can’t quite stay on key, sexual hang-ups for days, and the seeming conviction he may, in fact, be black. Dulli could introduce a song “Ladies/Let me tell you about myself/I’ve got a dick for a brain/And my brain is gonna sell my ass to you” and let his corrosive charisma and charred voice do the rest.

After a fetal 1988 debut called Big Top Halloween they’ve longed to forget, Up in It showed some signs of ambition beyond the Sub Pop Singles Club, but thudding production hides the band’s latent smarts in sludge. The quantum leap that is Congregation shows they ditched grunge for soul because they were no damn good at the former and ladies dig the lat-ter. Dulli’s sex-god persona is coming into focus. Convinced submission (“I’m Her Slave”), predation (“Tonight”), and absolution (“This Is My Confession”) are all necessary to balance out the guilt and pleasure, and he macks like an expert at all of them. The hidden track, “Miles Iz Dead,” brings a terrific faux-funk riff to life and sums up Dulli’s seduction strategy thus: “Don’t forget the alcohol.”

The placeholding Uptown Avondale dives into soul covers such as Freda Payne’s “Band of Gold” and the Supremes’ “Come See About Me.” It’d be nice if Dulli stayed on key the whole time, but the band’s hearts and hips are in the right place.

But Gentlemen they will take to their grave. A brilliant, knowing record sleeve hides one of ’90s rock’s messiest psychodramas. Reportedly written after a particularly nasty breakup, the Gentlemen song cycle portrays the artist as a grandmaster headfucker, the kind of guy you would keep your slightly obsessive sister away from at all costs even as she is, once again, climbing into his car. Dulli chronicles the melodramatic chess of maximum codependence with vengeful loathing, self- and otherwise, while the band—guitarist Rick McCollum in particular—pounds out complex, almost proggy R&B. From the howling single “Debonair” and the subtle, savage fuck-off “Be Sweet” to the plaintive “What Jail Is Like” and the astoundingly bitter “When We Two Parted,” Gentlemen dissects the sort of emotional train wreck few bands have ever documented as unflinchingly. Gentlemen is toxic and cunning, hopelessly arrogant and just plain hopeless. (What Jail Is Like is more soul covers and killer live tracks, demonstrating that almost any live bootleg from here forward is worth a spin.)

“Tonight I say goodbye/To everyone that loves me,” opens Black Love, a smoother, more flagrantly soulful, and somehow even darker album. Where Gentlemen at least felt like the catharsis of vibrant autobiography, Black Love’s noir-novel vibe balls up in the pit of your stomach and eats right through. The album’s overtly cinematic feel works like a distancing effect until you realize just how fucked up Dulli sounds. The opening “Crime Scene Part One” is thunderously dramatic, but the funk on “Going to Town” and the “Honky’s Ladder” jive feels more shticky than sticky.

Created after an increasingly ill Dulli received treatment he clearly really, really needed for clinical depression, 1965 is the headfucker on Zoloft. Instead of hating himself and the world, Dulli, who’s never sung better, sounds like he’s actually enjoying sex because sex is fun and not just a power trip he can’t escape. He shouts out Nas on “Omerta,” and “John the Baptist” and “Somethin’ Hot” shake what his mama gave him, while “Neglekted” is just plain dirty. At the time, 1965’s groove thang felt like a mild letdown from the previous trilogy’s relentlessness, but in hindsight it’s clear Dulli wasn’t as used to joy as pain, and probably had as much to say about the former as the latter. Having been almost famous for a little too long, the Afghan Whigs called it a day in February 2001. (JOE GROSS)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide