The Afghan Whigs - In Spades

Drowned In Sound 90

Yet here we are again. It’s 2017, there’s a new Afghan Whigs record in my inbox. I’m buoyed by the release of instant Whigs classic ‘Devil In Profile,’ but reticent enough that it’s a couple of days before I find the courage to run through In Spades. It starts slowly with ‘Birdland’, which feels more like a Twilight Singers opener, but by the time ‘Arabian Heights’ hits its first chorus, I’m back on board. Even though only Dulli and John Curley remain, this is a Whigs record to the core. Far from either a retreat or victory lap, they’ve instead expertly built on the Blaxploitation funk and granite soul of their final two Nineties records and made it new again. You can throw on 1965 and then In Spades without losing anything except McCollum and the arrogance of frontman youth.

Take ‘Toy Automatic’: on the surface, it’s the best song Augustines never wrote, birthed from Springsteen and booze, but the sudden bass fuzz and jubilant horn break is pure Dulli and Curley, unexpected and inspired. It’s the primal flipside of 1965’s ‘Crazy’ – undiluted and without restraint, within a questioned reality that doesn’t feel quite so harmful anymore. ‘Light As A Feather’ harks back to Black Love’s ‘Going to Town’ with its menacing, Seventies-indebted backdrop, and begins a closing three-song run that’s as good as anything the Whigs have ever done. Halfway through, dosing my hangover with too much coffee, I find myself muttering 'I fucking LOVE this band' aloud to an empty room.

Dulli has stated in recent interviews that this album is about memory and the distortion of time that comes with age, but they’re really just new reference points within classic Whigs themes of doubt, darkness and unhealthy relationships. Even in his fifties, Dulli is probably the only singer who can make lines like “so far inside you now / I am your silhouette” evoke both a threat and a come-on. Only ‘Copernicus’ lands completely wide of the mark, its dreary swamp-rock echoing everything I disliked of the band’s last appearance. When not accompanied by Mark Lanegan, it’s an ill-fitting suit for Dulli and should remain as far away from The Afghan Whigs as humanly possible. You hear me, Greg?

It’s worth remarking that, in the years between the Whigs’ breakup and reformation, no one could fill the void they left. Do to the Beast left me doubting that even they could do it anymore, but In Spades is a fitting rebuke to that infidelity. I still hold out hope of hearing McCollum’s guitar on an Afghan Whigs album again, but maybe I’m being overly sentimental. Ultimately, this is the best thing Dulli has put his name to since Blackberry Belle. One look at his discography over the intervening period will confirm just how good that is.

The Guardian 80

(Sub Pop)

These Cincinatti alt-rockers released their seventh album, Do to the Beast, in 2014. It was their first release in 16 years, and built on the bluesy, soul-flecked sound they had developed over the course of several acclaimed albums in the 80s and 90s. Now their second wave continues with a darker record that frontman Greg Dulli has described as “spooky”, centred on themes of death and the uncanny. “I wanna go deep down to where my soul has gone”, he laments on The Spell, while the sad, swelling ballad I Got Lost was written as a response to learning that collaborator Dave Rosser had been diagnosed with cancer. But despite its subject matter, this isn’t a pitch-black record. Arabian Heights is cocksure and sardonic, propelled along by slide guitar, scuzz and drums both ferocious and syncopated; lead single Demon in Profile is horn-driven and moody but danceable, too – with some trademark snark – and Birdland is infused with jazz sensibility. Ingenuity in spades.

The Guardian 80

(Sub Pop)

A mastery of soul influences and Greg Dulli’s twin lyrical themes of obsessive lust and simmering anger made the Afghan Whigs stand out from the mid-90s alt-rock herd. Their 2014 comeback Do to the Beast – featuring just Dulli and bassist John Curley from the original line-up - was a little underwhelming, but its follow-up finds them rewinding the years more successfully. The bruising Arabian Heights has real swing and swagger, while Toy Automatic and lead single Demon in Profile benefit from more light and shade, and the judicious use of a horn section. Closer Into the Floor, meanwhile, showcases Dulli’s still spine-tingling ability to switch from a croon to an anguished howl.

Pitchfork 76

Back in the 1990s, the Afghan Whigs were way ahead of the curve on what would become two of the most dominant tropes in 21st-century rock’n’roll: an open embrace of R&B on one hand, and widescreen Springsteen-sized epics on the other. And yet, you’d be hard-pressed to find a band today that actually sounds like the Afghan Whigs. Because no band has a frontman quite like Greg Dulli, who possesses such a distinctively raw rasp of a voice and such a particular lyrical POV, the thought of trying to emulate him is probably why artists don’t cover hip-hop songs more often—it feels less like an act of musical homage than intellectual property theft.

And so, even though the Afghan Whigs’ second post-reunion album after 2014’s Do to the Beast bolsters their current six-piece lineup with a small army of string and horn players, the most resounding instrument we hear throughout emanates from Dulli’s ravaged throat. As ever, Dulli spends the majority of In Spades teetering on that shaky precipice where romance turns to rancor, and pillow talk leads to restraining orders. But like a master genre filmmaker, he’s always got a couple of new tricks up his sleeves to keep us on our toes. “Birdland” honors his tradition for slow-burning, cinematic scene-setters, but rather than gently immerse us into his nocturnal netherworld, we’re pushed right in by staccato shocks of harmonium and operatic vocal gasps, like strobe-lit flickers of an image that take you a few moments to process into a fluid moving picture. “We’re coming alive in the cold,” Dulli declares, like a beast reawakened and ready to do damage once again.

Like its 2014 predecessor, In Spades is closer in scope and spirit to Dulli’s other group, the Twilight Singers, than to the Afghan Whigs’ ’90s-era output—which is to be expected given that this reformed line-up is essentially the Twilight Singers with original Whigs bassist John Curley. The branding is pretty much immaterial at this point; what matters really is that Dulli can still pull off his louche lover-man act with conviction—and surprising poignancy. “Copernicus” comes on like cock-rock with an STD, its ugly fuzz riff and pounding backbeat goading its predatory protagonist into action, but then suddenly at the two-minute mark, the song blossoms into a wistful lament for the one who got away. Taking a different route to a similarly fraught destination, “Toy Automatic” is a survey of a shipwrecked relationship that makes you feel like you’re actually standing alongside Dulli on some wind-battered shoreline.

In Spades clocks in at just 10 songs in 36 minutes, but feels as expansive and substantial as a double-album statement. And that’s thanks in large part to coolly paced, multi-sectional songs like “Arabian Heights” and “Light As a Feather,” where Dulli masterfully ratchets up the tension before unleashing his fevered howl at just the right moment (while reminding us that the Whigs are the rare rock band that can pull liberally from ’70s Blaxploitation funk without sounding like they’re making a jokey porno soundtrack). The album’s dramatic arc is completed by two late-game pleas for redemption—though the melodramatic, string-swept closer “Into the Floor” feels like overcompensating in the wake of the devastating piano confessional “I Got Lost,” Dulli’s best ballad since Black Love’s “Faded.” This is a familiar Dulli mind trick: play the bastard for a whole record, and then elicit our sympathies for being such a hopeless fuck-up. Vicious cycles like these are welcome so long as the records turn out as good as this.