the afghan whigs: black love

also "superstition"
also, my favorite, "creep"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kPRWJah3Rc

this is one i keep coming back to

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmIWkiTZ8qM

its none of those. its either of these...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6ixNnsGYdc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5cY7YduMlU

"Come See About Me" with "Rot" and "My World Is Empty Without You" just behind.

"Dark End of the Street" and "Beware" are up there, too.

Just listened to "Beware" for the first time in 20+ years and it kinda sucks, actually.

Come See About Me is inspired for going so dark/minor. Creep I like because it's more or less contemporary, so there's no veneer of classic soul-music nostalgia/fetish.

On my phone so can’t see the YouTube links as embeds, sonit may have been mentioned already but my “best Whigs cover” vote is, and always will be, for their version of “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love”. Particularly the video of them tearing through it at some MTV awards show.

they covered 'i'll be around' on their (original) last tour -- it is predictably great

"musically honky's ladder might be the purest distillation of the whigs sound? that song ATTACKS - but lyrically maaaaybe a bit too heavy on the michael mann schtick"
WTF is Honky's Ladder about?

peeping what i got stuck between your eyes?
touching the light?
drugs?

I kind of like their super coked-out cover of 'Nighttime' though objectively it's terrrible

💪 What’s the strongest run of three songs in a row on an album?

— BBC Radio 6 Music (@BBC6Music) February 26, 2018

Late vote for Faded.

noted

best album

almost certainly linked this before, but hey

http://lastplanetojakarta.com/articles/gentlemen.html

the author is a friend of the site

i'm still so mad that no radio ever played the whigs for me in the 90s, they were a band whose name i knew but back then there were so few avenues for hearing stuff if it wasn't on the radio and you didn't want to spend precious $ on a cd.

otoh when i finally heard gentlemen in the mid 2000s i was 23 or 24 and that was probably a better time to hear it.

almost certainly linked this before, but hey

http://lastplanetojakarta.com/articles/gentlemen.html

― mookieproof, Friday, June 19, 2020 8:03 PM (fifty-nine minutes ago)

...

By the time one gets through the ballad, “My Curse,” sung achingly by Scrawl’s Jody Stephens

thinkingface.emoji

fair, but let's not get too thinkingface

i ahall die alone with no legacy whatsoever, but i'll never disavow this

btw 'faded' > 'purple rain'

― mookieproof, Wednesday, January 31, 2018 8:12 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Critical acumen (or lack of it) is something I think about often. For better or worse, at present, I'm really just relying on, or bringing attention to, the primacy of emotional response and trusting (inhabiting?) that - while being aware that it's a fallible, suspicious register or, at the very least, only part of the process of working out why one likes something.

Anyway, after not using my car for the best part of two months, I've taken to listening to this when I have to drive and I've nearly had to pull over a couple of times. Sure, there are lots of things happening to all of our deep workings and who knows what damage has been done, but Summer's Kiss in particular completely destroys me. It's partly a thing of pure pleasure at the production and the unbridled roar of the guitars but there's something tectonic working down there that I don't really get. The final crescendo is one of those things where I wish I could have been in the studio so I could say don't stop there! ffs, but glad that I can't be so that I'm powerless and can have that exquisite release each time. Then Faded happens and oh fucking hell I'm just a blubbering wreck of a man.

"Honky's Ladder" has the worst lyrics, but the best guitar. "

"WTF is Honky's Ladder about?"

I think it is the best tune on the LP and definitely one to go on the Whigs best songs. I take the lyrics being someone shaking down someone with a pistol to the face requesting money for the drugs they have provided, perhaps to a close friend or relative.

I admit that the lyrics don't read well, but they do fit the music perfect. It is like when you first saw the lyrics to "Gimme Shelter" wrote out - you might go, 'is that it?' I'd kinda compare the tunes in that they both have that menace and forboding to them, albeit the Whigs song is very less known. The track does seem like a tune ready made for a 90s crime sound track.

chinaski i used to cry A LOT (like a lot a lot a lot) while listening to this album -- while walking, while driving, while seated at home. it wasn't nostalgia and it couldn't have always been pms, so i think this album has some magical quality that zings right to the feelings and electrifies them. bulletproof was my personal ultimate catalyst for uncontrollable weeping.

i'll never forget seeing their first reunion show at the bowery ballroom and realizing they were going to do "bulletproof" -> "summer's kiss," i think i burst into tears

lol @ how many times i've brought up that show in this thread

But it really can't be said enough how life-changingly great this band is live.

"Black Love" benefits I think from following "Gentlemen," which I think as far as it goes was sort of an accidental crossover. That is, timing and critical acclaim put the band on the radar for people peak-grunge/alt, but ultimately the group just had too much going on (or were too heavy or intense or whatever) for the average alt day tripper. Kind of like the folks who picked up "Laid" by James based on the single. That's one of my favorite albums of all time, but so much of it is so spare and ghostly and subdued that anyone (at least in America) that went for the single might not have dug the rest. So back to "Black Love," I feel that album slipped under the radar in a way. Either it was not the album casual fans expected after "Gentlemen," or it was too much the album the band should have made after "Gentlemen," if that makes any sense. All I know is that at the time there were countless copies of "Black Love," like "Laid," clogging up the used CD bins.

"honky's ladder" was a weird choice of lead single and i think dulli's said that it was the label's decision that he disagreed with and that they had a lot of other trouble with their label at the time. "my enemy" always seemed like the most obvious single to me but it wasn't one

i feel like if "going to town" didn't do it for them nothing would

yeah I agree with that

I NEED to see these duys live again at some point. Their coheadlining set with BTS was amazing but TOO SHORT.

Is their an interview or article where Dulli talks about his connection to Los Angeles? I know he lived there before/during the Afghan Whigs early days.

He owns or owns a couple of bars there.

He worked at Tower Records on Sunset Blvd in Hollywood I think around 1984-1985, before the formation of the Whigs. It's a block and a half from the Whisky and about a 20 minute walk to the corner of Fountain & Fairfax. I remember he talked about writing most of Big Top Halloween out there, but I was wondering if there was a longer piece where he talks more in depth about his life and times living in Hollywood during the glam-rock era.

i recall a twilight singers show shortly after elliott smith died during which he went on at *excruciating* length about how they knew each other in la and where they hung out, etc etc as the band vamped endlessly

good album

it's absurd to me that Gentlemen got almost 2x the votes in the album poll thread. Black Love is obviously the better, more fully realized album.

your bad takes scourge me

1965 > Black Love > Gentlemen

^^^^ black love is my fave but any ranking of those records is legit

They are each incredible, emotive, savage, funny, thrilling records. All clearly come from the same writer & same players, working in the same genre - Dulli’s voice would be clear as a writer of words even if his vocals weren’t on them - yet each has a distinctive tone that holds for the whole album.

There’s no wrong way to rank them.

imo you can also throw twilight in there

Black love > gentlemen > 1965

I still find 1965 spotty & a tad embarrassing. Would not play it for someone who has never heard them to say “hey I once totally loved this band”
Black Love best communicates best what I love about this band.

Solidarity on the crying front, La Lechera!

Another thing about the impact of Summer's Kiss is how it makes a call to Suffering by Satchel: the lyric 'put on your old fur coat, it's 1973' features in both and I have no idea which was first and don't care.

Dulli is an unusual case. I like savage as a descriptor for him as he does have a wildness - in the pit of his voice and in the way he roams around within a bar, pressing at the boundaries, to the point where it feels improvisatory a lot of the time.

I think I'd take Congregation over 1965 tbh (despite a few incredible songs on the latter)

This is their best album by quite some distance - more fully formed songwriting than Gentlemen and not as hammy as 1965. Even if the hamminess is part of the point this album just hits the perfect midpoint between the fire, the sleaze, the darkness and moments of unexpected beauty.

my main arguments for Black Love > Gentlemen is the production is fuller and it has a real ending

imo you can also throw twilight in there

No less good, but entirely different players*, and the character is writing in a tone of regret & reaching toward redemption, instead of celebrating their assholism. Which makes for a great sequel, after the increase of swagger:self-loathing ratio across the last three, but further marks it as separate.

* bar a couple of guest stars obv

As I throw the chains
I forged in life
To shatter on the floor