Music reviews. CD reviews. Critically hip!

This is going to sound weird, but I never really got the Afghan Whigs until doing some seriously listening to UNBREAKABLE, an 18 track overview of their career, stretching from the Sub Pop releases of the early 1990s through two new tracks recorded/finished in 2006. This is made doubly unusual by the fact that the track order is all over the frigging place chronologically, as opposed to starting at the beginning and ending at, well, the ending, dammit. That having been said, if the job of UNBREAKABLE is to attend to the choir while converting the skeptical, it has performed adequately with respect to the latter, at the very least.

Greg Dulli, the primary (but not the only) creative force behind The Afghan Whigs, always appeared to affect a faux white boy soul that until now never quite cut it for me, either because I was too damn old and enamored with my collection of Stax/Volt music to appreciate his efforts. Someone said that if Motown’s music, the choreographed Supremes/Temptations/Four Tops effort, was about kissing, Stax/Volt --- Otis Redding, Johnnie Taylor, Rufus Thomas --- was about screwing. The Whigs seemed to be about being, in the words of Jello Biafra, too drunk to fuck. Their apparently affected, give-a-shit production and playing added to appearances, and deceptively so. Yet, listening to “Debonair” from GENTLEMEN (which has one of the more disturbing covers I’ve seen on a disc before or since), one can sense exactly where the band was coming from, with its funk guitar riff from the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back.” The Afghan Whigs oozed sex and soul and funk, but eschewed the beggin’ songs that were the bedrock of their influence. “Be Sweet,” also from GENTLEMEN, lets the cat out of the bag, not just for the Whigs, but for men in general: when Dulli sings “I’ve got a dick for a brain” everyone knows exactly what he means. “Come See About Me,” a beery yet subliminally menacing cover of The Supremes tune that was part of a five song auld lang syne to Sub Pop, is not about seduction; in Dulli’s hands, it is a command. It could easily roll over the closing moments of any episode of Rescue Me. Yet, one never knew if The Afghan Whigs were serious, putting everyone on, or both. I vote for both. “Uptown Again,” from 1965, the band’s nominal swan song, references Nirvana’s “(Smells Like) Teen Spirit” in such a subtle way that its almost past you before you realize what they did.

The two new tracks, “Magazine” and “I’m A Soldier” (a track began in 2001 and finished in 2006) could easily have been on GENTLEMEN or 1965, or perhaps, on a new proper release. While the mainstays of The Afghan Whigs --- Dulli, bassist John Curley and guitarist Rick McCollum --- are all busy on independent projects, their parting was a friendly one, more of a realization that they had reached the end of a journey than a squabble over which fork in the road to take. There may, in a perfect universe, be more to be heard collectively from these gentlemen. Should that happen, I’ll be ready next time.