The Afghan Whigs - Gentlemen at 21 (Deluxe Edition) (2014)

Afghan Whigs’ fourth album and major-label debut, 1993’s Gentlemen, is a harrowing song cycle chronicling the death throes of a relationship. Removed from the alt-rock boom of the early '90s, Gentlemen at 21 offers some fresh insights into the collection, but fortunately doesn’t remaster or repackage the mystery out of it.

Greg Dulli sings about some fucked-up shit on the Afghan Whigs’ fourth album and major-label debut, 1993’s Gentlemen, a harrowing song cycle chronicling the death throes of a relationship. But when it came time to record “My Curse”, one of the darkest moments on the album, he didn’t think he had it in him. “I tried to sing it, but it was kinda really impossible for me to do,” he told Loose Lips Sink Ships back in 2005. “It was too close to the bone. Basically I chickened out.” That’s a remarkable thing to contemplate: This is, after all, an album that serves as an emotional exorcism, visceral and violent, played by a band not known for its squeamishness. Rather than tackle the song himself, Dulli enlisted Marcy Mays of the Columbus, Ohio, band Scrawl, and she sings the absolute hell out of it. Her slurred, scrawled vocals are tough-minded and defiant one moment, freshly bruised and broken the next, as she treads the tightrope between temptation and repulsion, between pleasure and pain.

“Curse softly to me, baby, and smother me in your love,” she all but begs, as though she must summon the courage to get each syllable out of her mouth. “Temptation comes not from hell but from above.” It is, to say the least, a powerful moment, but it also fulfills an important narrative function: If Gentlemen documents the demise of a romance, then “My Curse” allows the woman to tell her own side of the story, to call out the posturing in Dulli’s hyper-masculine lyrics, to express explicitly the pain he is inflicting on her. Offering a new perspective on the album’s brutal sexual politics, Mays reveals his outsize persona to be a ruse: a defense mechanism with which he can refract emotions too dark and messy and traumatic to face head on.

Perhaps that’s why the album still sounds so vital and so fresh 21 years on. Removed from the alt-rock boom of the early '90s, Gentlemen is both personal and unknowable, cocksure yet deeply troubled—in other words, so complicated and contradictory that we’re still trying to untangle its knots. Gentlemen at 21 offers some fresh insights into this song cycle, but fortunately doesn’t remaster or repackage the mystery out of it. The album sounds sharper and a bit more dangerous, those coiled guitars riffs more potent and Steve Earle’s drums wilder and more insistent. And the bonus demos and covers reveal the DNA of the album, signaling not only the rock and R&B sources that inspired Dulli, but also giving some insight into the band’s creative process before they trekked down to Ardent Studio in Memphis, Tennessee.