AFGHAN WHIGS - In Spades

So, the returning Afghan Whigs really meant business, a few years back. A decent album delivered after three decades-and-a-half... no, after fifteen years of hibernation, the old-days chemistry recovered at the first opportunity and ready to prove itself the key ingredient of a triumphant tour, one unexpectedly fruitful in terms of new songs, despite a few significant departures. The fruits of that rekindled enthusiasm are now being served up, as Sub Pop releases the gang's eighth full-length under Greg Dulli's leadership. A striking, esoteric cover, shadowy suggestions scattered about, an ambiguous title that hints at the sheer unmistakability of excess: this is a strange record, this "In Spades", a work dedicated to memory crumbling away, to the chaotic blurring of recollections. But it's also an album that, for the umpteenth time, delights in mixing erotic drive with premonitions of death, specifically tied to the terrible illness that doesn't seem to leave much hope for guitarist Dave Rosser (already a member of Twilight Singers and Gutter Twins).

Opened by an unexpectedly chamber-like minimalism ("Birdland"), the collection was written and produced by the frontman — aided in the studio by Blind Melon guitarist Christopher Thorn and by Ani DiFranco's husband Mike Napolitano — across New Orleans, Memphis, Los Angeles and Joshua Tree, leading a crew that also includes veteran John Curley on bass, Raconteurs drummer Patrick Keeler, and Petra Haden and Rick Nelson of the Polyphonic Spree on strings.

The mechanical rhythms of "Arabian Heights" don't undermine the band's galloping, even leonine authenticity, even as they stamp a perhaps overly coercive impulse on the other details laid out on the table. In keeping with this new chapter, the frontman's voice makes no attempt to disguise its current labored state, and that's hardly a surprise — "Do To The Beast" already made that clear — but coming to terms with this reality again demands a fresh, wearying acceptance from anyone who loved the Cincinnati band's classics to distraction and now finds themselves wrong-footed once more. Of course, when Dulli refrains from forcing things and glides on the velvet of his unmistakable noir-tinged rock — in the magnificent single "Demon In Profile" more than in the on-the-nose "I Got Lost" — the band still has every chance of casting its old, elegant spell. Other passages, however messy and evidently prone to an imbalance of forces ("Toy Automatic"), prove no less captivating, sparing themselves any kind of adulteration and letting Greg's sensual vocal be submerged by electric flourishes and reverb.

Afghan Whigs haven't disavowed their vicious musical temperament, the fundamentally physical weight of a sound that remains, as ever, superbly polished, and you can bet that with a vocal performance less forcibly reduced to near-evanescence they could still speak with real authority within an alternative scene that, honestly, isn't exactly at its peak. We have to make do with what's on offer, knowing full well that class, at least, doesn't evaporate overnight. Without venturing into more inventive or eccentric territory, the Ohio boys stick with the same code — somewhere between languid and prickly — that has defined their mature-period records, setting aside the imbalances and mannerist temptations that here and there, in "1965" for instance, had begun to creep in. The inflection always tends toward the full-blooded, the surface appears subtly modernized (though without any structural upheaval), and the songwriting, above all, remains confirmed as the most solid guarantee on offer.

If there's no trace of special effects used as a disguise, it's all the more true that no deception will be found here. The two trademark guitars and Dulli's faintly Luciferian swagger on "Light As A Feather", the toxic horns that seal the woozy "The Spell", stand solely as tokens to be cashed in for loyalty, a perspective in which "In Spades" works to the best of its abilities. Dulli does his part, at times working by way of compensation, donning a mask even more emphatic than the ones we remembered from him. The humanity suggested by finitude, the flawed nature, the fragility of his performance — stubborn as it remains — represent the greatest source of interest in this pleasurable, if out-of-step, outing, straight out of the smoky past of a band that simply refuses to throw in the towel.

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05/05/2017