“He’s all thin now, and he wears these little tight suits, and he’s got these grandpa reading glasses, like, ‘Hey, I can’t do nothing to nobody no more. Oh, me? I’m just an old, old man. I don’t have the appetites’”.
John Mulaney’s Bill Clinton bit came to mind while recently reading Afghan Whigs frontman Greg Dulli’s wisdom on aging, e.g., trying to become the man he thinks he should have been. Here’s a songwriter whose dozens of antagonist-protagonists acted on decisions without fear of regret or the easy marks who lay in ruins. He embraced the role of playboy when most 90s frontmen tried at least paying lip service to feminism.
As a Village Voice article from around the time the Whigs reunited in the 2010s noted, it’s not like Dulli & Co. were GG Allin. But mischief and misbehaviour made quite a cocktail. When the pendulum swung he could affect sensitivity, like when an anonymous fanzine called Fat Greg Dulli tried to derail the Gentlemen release – the same album that notoriously swaggered “I’ve got a dick for a brain” before turning puppy-dog with pleas of “Be sweet”. Black suits, sunglasses at midnight, persistent clouds of smoke, and soul music, all the Whigs were missing was a full tank of gas and a half-pack of cigarettes. The band always looked like adults in a room of rock savages, though the excesses undercut notions of maturity. Now maturity has hit them like a tonne of bricks.
Soft Control is the band’s first acknowledgement of mortality since “reuniting” (it’s really just a loose collective now) in the twenty-teens. Despite the deaths of guitarist Dave Rosser and Dulli’s eventual close collaborator (and ex-Screaming Trees) Mark Lanegan, 2022’s How Do You Burn? was pieced together during the pandemic and therefore wanted to scream that it was alive. The album barely had any room for the past, much less those in the ground. Being stereotype-proof and experimental, however, might have had something to do with muted reactions to it. Dulli’s expertise was cultivating reactions, but when you subvert that personality in deference to variety it creates distance.
This is not to say that Soft Control panders to an aging, core audience, but it undoubtedly has them in mind. As much as the Whigs can be said to have a classic sound – volume-pedal swells, wah-inflected slide guitar, open strings – the album embraces those sonics without being self-referential. Just as with In Spades, this set has a fondness for 1996’s oft-overlooked Black Love, which on paper would be like Dinosaur Jr aping Without A Sound or something similar. Closing track “A Simulation” joins a long line of epic album-enders, including “Closing Prayer”, “Faded”, and “Omerta”.
As mentioned, however, age-denial no longer plays an enormous role. When Dulli sings “I don’t look behind no more”, on “77”, he speaks about embracing what remains of the future. “Duvateen”, one of the lead singles, jokingly muses, “Fuck me twice / I’m banging Nicorette”, but is really about the blackout curtains that encased his homes for a decade. “My Lover” is an ode to semi-domestic sex. Two hearts expire on “Memphis, Texas”: “one frozen… one broken”. “You walk away on the ceiling,” he sings after someone, possibly Lanegan.
The rascal frequently reappears, however. “House Of I” leans into “Sympathy For The Devil” self-referentially. Meanwhile brass instruments like trombone and muted trumpet materailise from those years haunting New Orleans. As Dulli recently told a newspaper interviewer, “In case you want to go explore again.”
