The Afghan Whigs
Do to the Beast

THE REVIEW

“To me, there's nothing on earth other than women. It's why I get out of bed every morning.” (James Ellroy)
Afghan Whigs. Thirteen years later. The aesthetic backdrop to which memory resorts is a 1940s film noir (not coincidentally Greg Dulli, the bandleader, is an avid reader of Ellroy): a dark and crepuscular Los Angeles, half-smoked cigarette butts, and an empty glass, warm rays of dawn illuminating what remains of a night consumed in desire and regret, the face of her claiming once and again the forefront of the mind.                                  
Dulli in these thirteen years has, in reality, not been idle and between Twilight Singers and side projects (among which it's worth mentioning the Gutter Twins with Mark Lanegan) he has always remained with us, an indefatigable Charon, a Shakespearian actor sly and composed, a drinking companion, a black and white diva captured in the sublime and heartbreaking moment of her unstoppable decline. He has confirmed himself, through ups and downs, an excellent interpreter of timeless torch songs, a perfect singer of that thin shadow line dividing day from night.                                                                                   In 2001, after the breakup of the Whigs and in the midst of his personal season in hell, he was reduced to being a bartender; lost in a whirlpool of drugs and varied addictions without touching a guitar for a year. The video of “Algiers” gives him back to us, slightly fatter but not defeated, with large dark glasses and a pimp suit confirming the Luciferian and provocative nature of the character. But let's get to the question any fan of the Cincinnati band would ask: Does a reunion with 2/4 of the original band make sense after almost three decades of absence, a time period in which the pop-rock world has drastically changed and not for the better? For me, the answer is affirmative. The songwriting is not always excellent, perhaps we could have spared ourselves without regret the hard trash tirade of “Parked Outside” and the beautiful but predictable “Algiers” and honestly also “Can Rova”, which pleases but fails to make a mark even after repeated listens.                                                                         Despite this, the album offers some of Greg's best tracks of the last 10 years: the soul ballad “It Kills” (“It kills me to see you love another”) which transcends the pain of absence, with the Clare Torry-like howl of Van Hunt (almost a Greek chorus as Dulli defines it), the final crescendo of the magnificent “These Sticks” (which at the beginning not too subtly references Radiohead's “Street Spirit”), the updated and dance-funk-tinged Zeppelins of “Matamoros”. “Lost in the Woods” with its alternating of crepuscular piano-voice and sunny pop openings confirms itself as another pearl of the lot. Also excellent are “The Lottery” and “Royal Cream”, which seem like outtakes respectively from “Black Love” and “Gentlemen”, without ever reaching the heights of those two landmark albums. At the end of the listen, one realizes that the glories of the past might never be reached again, but the overall variety and the undeniable value of some tracks make it a more than dignified work, far from the nostalgic effect that inevitably weighs on operations of this kind. In a world where rockstars (or so-called rockstars) compete to quote this or that “cool” artist from the past, and where cheap kindness and morals abound like Hail Marys at a six o'clock mass; Dulli has no advice to give and could make his own that splendid phrase by Nabokov: “I am not a dog that runs to you wagging its tail, with a truth in its mouth”.