Gig review: The Afghan Whigs at Leeds University Stylus
The Cincinnati cult rockers roll into town with ample cause for celebration on their ruby anniversary, offering an opening night that pinballs from art-sleaze swagger to cinematic pop-noir.
Has it really been forty years since The Afghan Whigs arrived onto the guitar scene, oozing out of Ohio with their violently seductive cocktail of garage-soul sex and grunge-hued violence?
Perhaps the lack of an immediate transatlantic breakthrough for the Cincinnati cult rockers has folded the passage of time upon itself, or maybe their decade-long hiatus across the bulk of the noughties plays tricks on the mind, trimming their shelf-life with curious recall.
Either way, Greg Dulli and John Curley’s ruby anniversary rolls into Leeds with ample cause for celebration. Nominally supporting tenth record Soft Control – another superb post-reunion effort – they promise to cover virtually all of their catalogue, barring self-maligned debut Big Top Halloween.
The result is the opening night of a European run that gleefully pinballs from art-sleaze swagger to cinematic pop-noir; a headfirst dive into the bleak romanticism of their frontman’s psyche, delivered with fine polish and muscular aplomb over eighty-five minutes.
There is a cruel irony that an outfit as melodically intuitive as the Whigs never broke through to the commercial zenith several of their Sub Pop peers did. But any such successful excess may have twisted the formula from its roots – songs like Parked Outside and What Jail is Like revel in their menaced erotica, perverse numbers illuminated by the fairy lights snaked about the amplifiers and drum risers.
66, with its snapped-gum shuffle, might have earned onetime radio staple status; here, beefed up with bruising riffage, it sounds as provocatively hypnotic as Son of the South’s warped boogie-woogie barnburner, scratching furiously at dark fringes.
At sixty-one, Dulli remains in excellent voice, a sandpaper-croon that still climbs the ladders towards a desperate howl as he and his bandmates give some rarefied air to The Slide Song and Conjure Me after more than a decade of absence.
For The Deepest Part of the Darkest Shadow, hunched above the piano in semi-darkness, he appears half-engulfed as a barstool poet, soul filled with an aching quiet before the bombastic roar of My Enemy flips him around on a dime.
A few heavyweights are arguably missing, but by the time they close with Into the Floor’s lung-puncturing crescendo, only a churlish handful could be shortchanged.
“We’ll see you again, yeah?” Dulli asks as he departs the stage. The answer must be in the affirmative.