IT’S BEEN 16 years since the last Afghan Whigs album, but frontman Greg Dulli is typically bullish from its first note.
On crunching opener Parked Outside, he bellows: “If they want something more, give ‘em something new.”
A reinvention is questionable, but this is a polishing of the band’s brand of emotionally-wrought soul rock. With the loss of troubled lead guitarist Rick McCollum, singer Dulli is in total control.
As a consequence, Do To The Beast sounds as much like Dulli’s excellent post-Whigs projects, the Gutter Twins, his collaboration with Mark Lanegan, and rotating collective the Twilight Singers, as it does the Whigs.
There are moments when the band reaches the pent-up dramatics of their best work, 1996’s Black Love. These Sticks has a typically vertiginous chorus, while the clipped funk of Matomoros is motored by a feverish vocal from Dulli.
Algiers, with its spaghetti Western feel, sees Dulli pulling off Antony and The Johnsons-like vocal melodramatics. It may not be “something new”, but this stands alongside their best.
- Mark Edwards
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