Afghan Whigs
Sister Brother / Hey Cuz

The period straddling the second half of the '80s and the very early '90s was undeniably the golden age for the American indie rock microcosm. Labels like SST, Dischord, Touch & Go, and Sub Pop spearheaded an exceptional musical revolution, releasing epochal masterpieces like "Daydream Nation" or "Spiderland" and nurturing a brood of artists who would come to shatter the hierarchies of the pompous rock reigning in the mainstream.
The name of Seattle's Sub Pop is inseparably linked to grunge, and to seminal albums like "Superfuzz Bigmuff" or "Bleach." However, Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman's label was able to create initiatives involving several artists from the fertile indie scene of the United States. Exemplary in this sense was the "Singles Club," through which a tool - the 45 RPM record - that was beginning to become obsolete in the midst of the digital revolution was revived. The cream of the indie bands of the period (Sonic Youth, Flaming Lips, Dinosaur Jr, Smashing Pumpkins, Mudhoney, Nirvana) committed to recording fabulous singles on Sub Pop, to deliver a vivid testimony of the creativity and unrepeatable atmosphere of those years.

All this to say that "Sister Brother / Hey Cuz" was one of the best 7" records released during that period by the North West label. The Afghan Whigs, after all, were playing on home ground: Bruce Pavitt had discovered this band, in love with the Replacements and the Motown sound, in Cincinnati, and had signed them for their second album, the seismic "Up in It," from which precisely the stentorian "Hey Cuz" originates. A few months later, still in 1990, Greg Dulli and his associates churned out their definitive song: "Sister Brother" indeed. The Whigs’ repertoire doesn’t lack equally or perhaps more memorable episodes, but such emphasis is not out of place considering that here, for the first time, Dulli perfectly achieved the goal of his art: to create a sound that blended the roughness and fervor of post-punk with the pathos, physicality, and drama of black music. Everything flows perfectly in these 3 minutes and 35 seconds: the swinging stride of the rhythm section, a lacerating guitar, a piano spiraling into lascivious soul spirals. And then that voice: cynical, excruciating without being pathetic, that ventures with morbid precision and disconcerting depth into the perverse recesses of a story featuring glimpses of incest and the sweat of an interracial relationship. Sex as a litmus test of human relations, in a headlong journey between lust and despair. The usual confessions of a dangerous mind, in short: emphasized, moreover, in the related video clip (which was censored for the rawness of certain images), while Greg’s sense of humor (which often, especially at the time of lyrics like that of "Be Sweet", was not understood) is clearly visible on the cover.

In summary, "Sister Brother" was a crucial turning point in the career of the Afghan Whigs: the signal that the group was finally breaking away from the raucous hardcore and grunge of its early days, honing a distinct stylistic signature that would culminate in that trilogy of fundamental works ("Congregation," "Gentlemen," "Black Love") that placed the Cincinnati band among the narrow circle of truly greats of the past decade.