Afghan Whigs
Gentlemen

THE REVIEW

A Heartfelt Dive

Emotions that pierce through infinity to strike right at the soul's core, piercing, abysmal wounds that, when awakened, provoke ecstasy and torment.

In “Gentlemen,” all the most disparate sonic elements converge (Art-Rock? Allow me this small definition) that turn the songs into acts of self-flagellation of the soul, heart fragments with no master destined to shake the conscience of anyone approaching this album for the first time, sensations and flavors that remain unaltered even after numerous and varied listens, as if they imprint themselves permanently at the bottom of the soul. Listening to it gives me the idea of a submarine submerged at the bottom of the oceans, forgotten by all and then suddenly meant to resurface under the murky waters, revealing all its hidden treasures, ready to awaken and provide new energy to those who have long been asleep...

The initial notes which open the album (symbolically equivalent to a sharp cutting of the umbilical cord that kept us in the warm comfort of those who generated us) give life to these extreme sensations, an emotional charge hardly matched in the form of notes, even for a movement like Grunge, so strongly characterized by the human and desperate events of the musicians who made it famous, often ending in tragedy.

The band's stylistic and sonic evolution here reaches its natural completion, thanks to grafting onto a rough grunge bark a perfect fusion between Soul, Funky, and psychedelic elements.

The opening of “Gentlemen” with that voice so intensely expressive, legendary in its emotional surges and declarations of intent, so passionate both in its open-hearted confessions and in the orgiastic moments of pure anger and perversion, is definitely to be considered one of the rarest gems of the golden age of all the rock stars and stripes branded in the '90s.
From the riff of “If I Were Going” so deeply emotional, with Greg Dulli's voice rocking and leading us at the start of this journey, after a few disjointed moments of emptiness interspersed by the drums, the title track emerges, where the guitar riff shakes everything, followed by the singer's entrance. One of the highest moments of pathos of the entire album, these few and so intense seconds of the song connect, in my particular vision, to the birth of the individual, when the sweet notes of the first song are nothing but a preface to the start of life, “Gentlemen” is a manifesto and metaphor of the beginning of existence, so full of uncertainties and fears, but necessary to “exist” and bear witness to oneself; a fundamental vehicle over the years to mend the tears and wounds that bleed, destined to infect us inevitably inside.

This might be the ultimate sense of “Be Sweet,” another great masterpiece of the record, when just at the final part of the song Dulli says:

"So understand
Now that I come to you
To understand my little self
To understand my little self
And baby you be sweet...”

The entire album is pervaded by an insane desire to confess without hesitation, without barriers, a concept about love and its most morbid deviations, confessions that pass through the oblique and cursed riff of “Debonair,” to the heart-rending and melancholic singing of “What Jail Is Like,” to the delicate Psychedelia of “When We Two Parted”; a soft sonic scaffolding supported by the strength of the words of a wonderful and instinctive text that leads us irreversibly to abandonment, to liberating catharsis, in a crucible of emotions inexplicable in words. Only tears might attempt to explain all that traverses the soul, like a blade that sinks deep inside you, while Dulli sings in the finale:

“Out of the night we come
And into the night we go
If it starts to hurt you
Then you have to say so...”

As in the heartfelt declaration of intent of “Fountain and Fairfax,” where Dulli confessing to his love says he cannot keep the promises made and thus returns to the vortex of perversions that accompany him, to the sweet yet at the same time cruel visions of love, saturated with Soul and Blues hues of “My Curse,” enriched by the warm voice of Marcy Mays, and of “I Keep Coming Back,” and by the classic noisy and acidic Grunge of “Now You Know,” which paint a resounding and full of double meanings sound fresco, a work whose great strength lies precisely in this double ambivalence: tormented love relations, of people who have never completely understood each other, relations of people (it might even be that Dulli in these songs is actually speaking with the distorted vision of his self) living between grudges and strong passions in a continuous game of colors between the soft blue of the sky and the deep red of hell. A game of love and hate destined to prolong for eternity, without either being able to prevail over the other.

The closing of the album is entrusted to a chilling instrumental, “Brother Woodrow/Closing Prayer,” indeed, it is a fitting conclusion as well as a perfect final soundtrack to the tumultuous climax of interpersonal relations described and narrated in “Gentlemen,” as if listening to these songs one were actually watching a film, not coincidentally, in the last page of the booklet instead of the classic “recorded on” there is a more appropriate “shot on location”... Never has an end been so sweet, simple and full of meanings, and, despite the album's review already being present, the urge to narrate it my way, with all the emotions and the reopening and unlocking of wounds that often come alive again during its listening (and that all of us more or less carry within our souls), was too strong.

What else to say? The Afghan Whigs are and will forever remain one of my favorite bands, one of those (among many) that has given me the most on an emotional and conceptual level. A piece of history of all American rock, the adjective that most comes to mind right now is: “Unforgettable”... Truly, one of the most “beautiful and heartfelt” albums I have ever listened to.

Chapeau.