Artist: Afghan Whigs
Album: Gentlemen
Year: 1993
Remember what I said last time about emotional gutpunch albums? Well, Gentlemen is one of those. From the impossibly ironic title down, the album is one seething pile of caustic hatred and rage, aimed directly in the face of frontman Greg Dulli’s first adult love (her name was Kris). Gentlemen is completely unrelenting in its aggressive assault, with even the softest songs taking no prisoners and leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. The slow “Be Sweet” is melted apart halfway through by an acidic guitar solo from Rick McCollum, while “My Curse” is so broken and fragile, Dulli couldn’t even bring himself to sing it in the studio, instead relying on a friend, Marcy Mays, to sing the vocals. However, the heart of the album lies in the two peaks of poison-spitting anger near the beginning of the album: the title track and “Debonair”. “Gentlemen” is a jerking, shuddering diatribe about Dulli’s collapsing relationship, pointing fingers with lines like “we dragged it out so long this time, started to make each other sick” before concluding with “I waited for the joke, it never did arrive.” The band cranks up the guitars, with McCollum adding lacerating little guitar sproings throughout the bridge. On any other album, this would be as good as it gets, but Gentlemen has one last knockout punch with “Debonair”. A melodramatic tour de force driven by two key guitar riffs (one scratchy rhythm bit and a furiously descending lead), “Debonair” internalizes all the angst and rage. How can you argue with a song that has a chorus of “tonight I go to hell, for what I’ve done to you?” Five of the hardest hitting songs on this album, including “Gentlemen” and “Debonair” were recorded on Dulli’s twenty-eighth birthday, while he was cruising out of his mind on coke, trying to impress a stripper he’d brought back to the studio. You can literally hear his vocal chords tearing themselves apart by the end of the session (“Fountain And Fairfax”) but, in an album so obsessed with flaws and self-abuse, nothing could be more fitting.
Artist: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
Album: The Boatman's Call
Year: 1997
Oh lord. A Nick Cave breakup album? This is going to be a howling, apocalyptic mess, right? Cave is scary enough when he’s perfectly happy. Dear god, how unhinged would he be if he was heart-broken and consumed with anger? Well, The Boatman’s Call answers that question. As it turns out, Cave’s heartbreak takes the form of twelve stately, beautiful, piano-led ballads. Those expecting the usual bloodthirsty guitars and screaming were thrown for a loop when this album came out in 1997. Cave had two different women on his mind when he was writing these songs: Viviane Carneiro, with whom he had a son several years earlier and fellow dramatic singer PJ Harvey, with whom he had just finished a brief relationship. These two exes inspired Cave to write some of the calmest, most restrained music of his entire career for The Boatman’s Call (not that it has much competition). There’s plenty of the usual breakup album sentiment (“People Ain’t No Good”), but Cave’s a sucker for stories and he fills the album with his usual mess of Biblical references (“There Is A Kingdom”), ponderings about God (“Into My Arms”) and so on. However, women weren’t the only things Cave was breaking up with at the time. Following this album, Cave took a full three years off from recording to completely wean himself off the intense drug habit he’d cultivated since the 80s. The Boatman’s Call, as its title suggests, is full of the awareness that life is not eternal. By 1997, Cave was starting to realize that, one of these days, he was going to die and that speeding that process up with reckless living and music to match probably wasn’t the best idea.
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