Rockin’ on, despite it all
Greg Dulli makes a reflective return to his roots on ‘Powder Burns’
BY GLENN GAMBOA
Newsday Staff Writer
Greg Dulli has embraced his inner rocker again.
Though his band The Twilight Singers started as a decidedly less-rocking electronic group in 2000, over the years the former front man of the Afghan Whigs has slowly been sliding toward the gritty, soul-steeped indie rock that made that band one of the most revered acts of the ’90s. The new album, “Powder Burns” (One Little Indian), roars like vintage Whigs in places, while incorporating the sweeping, almost cinematic quality of The Twilight Singers’ early work.
“The first album was a reaction to the Whigs,” Dulli said, calling from his home in Los Angeles. “After that, I had to reconcile my twin interests.”
Dulli has always focused on seeming dichotomies - illuminating the brutal side of love, cataloguing the guilt that gets entwined with desire. And he carries on that tradition on “Powder Burns,” which he completed in post-Katrina New Orleans, under military curfews, with no running water and questionable electricity.
“It made it more difficult, but it became a monument to our steadfastness,” Dulli said, adding that he had already put in more than 18 months of work into the album, recording some tracks in Brooklyn, Los Angeles and Italy, as well as New Orleans. “We finished it as a sort of — you to the hurricane.
“I have never seen destruction like that,” he continued. “Trees had drowned. There were no birds, no dogs or cats. It was a ghost town, ‘Mad Max’ kind of desolation. Apocalyptic, really. The city was devastated, and it was all kind of sad, but there was also this real, indomitable spirit. There was joy. In the middle of all this tragedy, I really did see a lot of goodness, too.”
Those feelings seeped into “Powder Burns,” which was already packed with the emotions of Dulli kicking a drug addiction and dealing with the death of his friend, director Ted Demme. “After seeing what I saw,” he said, pausing to recall the devastation he witnessed firsthand, “it had to affect the feeling of the record.”
Each song on “Powder Burns” has a different vocal approach, making it sound like different characters are singing, Dulli said. He sounds lecherous and creepy on “Forty Dollars,” as he sings “Love don’t mean a thing but 2 a.m. and a telephone ring” before corrupting the Beatles’ “She Loves You.” He sounds regret-filled on the spare, haunting “The Conversation,” especially against the angelic harmonies of Joseph Arthur. And it’s no accident that the album’s most ferocious rocker is called “Underneath the Waves.”
In addition to the rockers from “Powder Burns,” Dulli plans to throw a few Whigs classics into the set at Irving Plaza tonight, something he refused to do a few years ago. “They’re my songs,” he said. “I’m not going to pretend I don’t know how most people know me. But there will only be one or two. It’s not like there’s a lack of Twilight Singers material.”
Philly TS Photos
A nice gallery of Twilight Singers photos from the TLA show at Studio M Live
Twilight stars shine
BostonHerald.com
By Christopher John Treacy
It was cool to hear the mix-tape variety of the between-set music for Monday’s Twilight Singers show at the Paradise. Former ABBA siren Frida’s 1982 Phil Collins-produced single ‘‘I Know There’s Something Going On” gave way to Janis Ian’s ‘‘At Seventeen,” and cuts by Linda Ronstadt and Jackson Browne were merged with snarky white-boy hip-hop tracks.
No doubt the tracks were hand-picked by Twilight Singers frontman Greg Dulli, whose eclectic taste is what fueled the unique sound of his former band, Afghan Whigs, as it does his current collective.
Dulli’s band began the same way that its new ‘‘Powder Burns” CD opens: After setting the stage with the instrumental ‘‘Toward the Waves,” the Twilight Singers ripped into ‘‘I’m Ready” with balls-to-the-wall abandon.
Dulli has acknowledged in interviews that ‘‘Powder Burns” is largely about his struggle to live drug-free after years of dangerous debauchery. ‘‘Bonnie Brae” recounts the painful drug-related destruction of a close friend and in a concert setting the song became a throttling powerhouse.
But Dulli’s always told stories about characters on society’s fringes, the rush of living fast and the costs of the related crash-and-burn.
Backed by bassist Scott Ford, drummer Bobby MacIntyre and guitarist Dave Rosser, and looking Johnny Cash-like in all black, Dulli reached back to his Afghan Whigs catalog for the smart fuzz-pop of ‘‘66.” ‘‘I never felt so out of control!” he bellowed.
Similarly, the reckless energy of ‘‘Teenage Wristband” posed the question, ‘‘Are you ready for the ride of your life?” Aerosmith’s ‘‘Dream On” served as the appropriate overture for ‘‘Love” from the Twilight Singers’ 2000 debut.
The Singers were tight without being stiff, but the soulful subtext that rings through Dulli’s best Afghan Whigs material was noticeably missing. He compensated with plenty of emotional force and gut-wrenching howls and even covered the Gnarls Barkley hit ‘‘Crazy” as an encore. But the show was just too loud; the nuances that give Dulli’s music its idiosyncratic appeal were lost in favor of sheer volume.
Joining the Twilight Singers on keyboards was Manuel Agnelli, the frontman for the night’s opener, After Hours, a band Dulli devotedly supports. The shaggy lads from Milan, Italy, oozed ’70s retro chic.Though Agnelli’s big voice is a notable asset, After Hours’ glamish, prog-metal sound and arena rock antics just seemed silly in the modest confines of the Paradise.
The Twilight Singers fuse beauty and ferocity
By Joan Anderman, Globe Staff
Here’s the trouble with making a brilliant album of cinematic scope and intense nuance: It’s nearly impossible to play it live.
Maybe that’s why Greg Dulli, the former Afghan Whig and mastermind of the Twilight Singers, performed only six of the 12 stunning songs from “Powder Burns” at the Paradise on Monday. Written while Dulli was coming out of a seven-year drug binge and laid to tape in a damaged New Orleans studio only weeks after Hurricane Katrina, the songs lasso the kaleidoscopic extremes of emotion that accompanied both those events. Our Boston nightclub, for all its charms, inspired no such catharsis in either the band or the audience.
That said, it was a great rock show — greater still when the opening act’s electric violinist came out to add harsh textures to “There’s Been an Accident” and “Papillon,” the latter one of the dozen or so older Twilight Singers tracks Dulli dusted off.
The set featured a reliably delicious onslaught of Dulli’s heavy, beautiful chords, a signature assortment of croons and screams, and the sort of dapper persona that generally eludes rockers. Dulli wears his dress shirt unbuttoned just so, uses a modified seat belt for a guitar strap, and has equipped his microphone stand with an ergonomically positioned cup holder. He did a combined cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire” and Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” and quoted Aerosmith’s “Dream On” at the start of trip-hoppy “Teenage Wristband” — moves that require no small surplus of attitude.
Like the artist, his songs swing brutally. Rocket-fueled show opener “I’m Ready,” the blissfully ravaged dealer’s lament “Forty Dollars,” and hard, moody “Annie Mae” (stripped, sadly, of the track’s original funk) showcased Dulli’s masterful feel for fusing beauty and ferocity. Nothing, however, captured the artist’s gloriously dark depths like the moment during “Candy Cane Crawl” when Dulli dragged a female fan who wouldn’t quiet down onto the stage, buried his hand in her hair, and forced her to waltz while she silently freaked out.
Powder Burns at Metacritic
Powder Burns has been added to Metacritic and is currently sporting a 75/100.
Powder Burns - Drowned in Sound
Drowned in Sound
Rating: 9/10
Nick Cowen
Redemption has to be hard-won if it’s to mean anything at all, and whether he knows it or not, Greg Dulli has been proponent of this credo for pretty much all of his career.
Back when Dulli was fronting the Afghan Whigs, he was probably the only advocate for action in an alt-rock mainstream which promoted wallowing in misery as an end in itself. While many of his contemporaries whined or raged impotently, Dulli stared hard into the mirror at his cracked reflection and tried to fix what was broken. He didn’t always succeed, but damn if he didn’t look good trying.
The music followed suit; ever since Dulli parked the Whigs at the dusky junction of 1996’s Black Love, the leering indie-rock-funk they trafficked in took on an increasingly darker tone. After his brief sabbatical following the Whigs’ demise in 2000, Dulli pretty much picked up exactly where he left off with The Twilight Singers, and if anything, headed for even more shadowy pastures. I’m not saying the man’s a completely nocturnal creature at this stage, but I’m betting he owns a lot of black.
Similar in hue to 2003’s Blackberry Belle, Dulli’s fourth outing with the Twilight Singers, Powder Burns, is anything but a re-tread. While Dulli’s working from his usual palette of muddy grooves, guitar-scree and leering swagger, the new album sounds more urgent and lucid in intention than its predecessors.
Opening with the sinister synth-lines of ‘Towards The Waves’, the record throws over the tender hand-holding of ‘Martin Eden’ and hits out with the sonic brickbat of ‘I’m Ready’; over fuzzed-out bass and jagged guitars, Dulli snarls, “I’m ready / to love somebody”, making it sound more like a threat than a declaration.
The intensity doesn’t let up. From the soaring choruses of ‘There’s Been A Murder’, to the bruising confessional of ‘Bonnie Brae’ and the chunka-chunka piano line of ‘Forty Dollars’, it’s clear Dulli is aiming high. There’s a new-found clarity to the proceedings, and the hooks are undeniably infectious. If before he was hinting at an altercation, here, he’s picking a fight.
Lyrically, the album is informed by two life-altering events in Dulli’s life; his decision to clean-up, and Hurricane Katrina’s devastating effect on his adoptive hometown of New Orleans. At his insistence, Powder Burns was finished in the battered city - instruments had to be powered by generators and recording time was restricted due to the curfew imposed by the National Guard. Dulli has also spoken in interviews of his disgust at how quickly so many people were to abandon The Big Easy in its hour of need.
But while ‘Bonnie Brae’ may face down drug addiction and ‘I Wish I Was’ pays tribute to New Orleans, one of Dulli’s greatest strengths as a songwriter has always been his ability to make his particular brand of lyrical melodrama universally applicable without resulting to eye-rolling clichés.
Powder Burns may document Greg Dulli’s latest bout with his external and internal demons, but it’s also the perfect soundtrack to anyone else’s nocturnal activities - however illicit they may be. If only every attempt at personal redemption extended such a warm and alluring invitation.
Montreal Twilight Photos
Veronique took some fantastic photos of the Twilight Singers show in Montreal. Gotta love those light trails.
The Twilight Singers Cabaret Music Hall 5-28-06
Dulli amplifies the intensity on new Twilight Singers
By Ron Wynn
Always known as one of the more impassioned, forceful vocalists in alternative rock, Greg Dulli’s newest venture with his current band The Twilight Singers is unquestionably the most lyrically striking, musically intense of his long career.
Powder Burns (One Little Indian), which was officially released last week, addresses issues of addiction and alienation in direct and honest fashion, with Dulli’s stark, earnest vocals dominant on each number. Dulli, who plays Mercy Lounge Sunday night heading the Twilight Singers along with Afterhours and Jeff Klein, says a decision to change some recording strategies had a major impact on the disc’s sound and energy.
“On a lot of the previous Twilight Singers’ sessions we did a lot of things after the fact,” Dulli said. “I’d bring people in and we’d be recording to a click track. This time we did almost everything live in the studio. I also wanted more electric guitar on the disc, and wanted it more prominent within the arrangements. My goal was for this CD to have a more visceral sound and impact than any Twilight Singers project before.”
With a varied, distinguished rotating group of performers that at various times includes Ani DiFranco, Joseph Arthur and former Afghan Whigs comrade John Curley, Dulli and company move through stirring numbers like “Towards the Waves,” which punctuates the crackling vocal with a synthesizer-driven backdrop, and “Forty Dollars,” a song whose use of rippling piano lines adds an unusual component, as well as the booming fuzz bass and slicing guitar that anchor “I’m Ready.”
But the two standout numbers are the highly personal cuts “Bonnie Brae,” which is a painful and poignant piece on drug addiction and the celebratory “I Wish I Was” that highlights Dulli’s adopted hometown of New Orleans.
“I watched a friend of mine struggling with what I’ve been battling with and I had to make a personal decision to get clean,” Dulli said. “I watched him almost die. That’s what ‘Bonnie Brae’ is all about. I spend about half the year in New Orleans, and I have no plans to abandon it, no matter what happens.”
In fact Dulli insisted on completing Powder Burns in New Orleans despite the impact of Hurricane Katrina. Generators were utilized for instruments during the sessions, which were also affected by curfews and martial law.
“Hey, what we went through in recording here compared to the real hardships that many people felt were nothing,” Dulli insisted. “I’d feel like some sort of pansy complaining about what we experienced compared to people throughout this region.”
Though he’s found widespread acceptance and critical acclaim heading the Twilight Singers, Dulli realizes that many fans still look back fondly at his years with the Afghan Whigs, a band that enjoyed immediate and sustained appreciation and impact from their 1988 debut Big Top Halloween until their demise in 2001.
“Those guys are my best friends, my brothers, and I’ll always look back on that time fondly,” Dulli recalled. “I just played a few dates with a couple of them last week and we’re talking about getting back together in terms of completing some things that we didn’t finish. But in terms of us ever going back out on the road, or ever reforming a touring edition of the Afghan Whigs, that’s probably never going to happen.”
Dulli on Y100
Tune in to Y100 in Philly tomorrow (tues) at 3pm to hear Jim McGuinn’s interview with The Twilight Singers’ Greg Dulli.
Powder Burns, All of This and More - Harp
The Twilight Singers, Powder Burns
The Afghan Whigs were one of the 1990s’ most improbable successes—pregrunge, postpunk rock band with a soul subtext and the cojones to play it straight. After the Whigs’ official dissolution in 2001, frontman Greg Dulli remained visible, fronting the Twilight Singers and working on various music, film and production projects. Bassist John Curley produced regional groups at his Cincinnati studio and the remaining Whigs kept low profiles.
Dulli’s work with the Twilight Singers has been fascinating and diverse, and with Powder Burns, his fourth Singers effort, Dulli has created his most majestic, sprawling and yet intensely personal album to date. For the first time, Dulli has fully integrated the Whigs’ elemental rock personality with the Singers’ adventurous musical nature, and the results are magnificent. The tumult of “Underneath the Waves” and the title track are beautifully balanced with the quiet reflection of “The Conversation” and the pop noir of “Forty Dollars,” with its sly Beatles references.
Meanwhile, Curley’s first post-Whigs band, Staggering Statistics, finds the uncommonly powerful bassist aligned with another manic muse in vocalist/guitarist Austin Brown. Like a wild blend of Public Image Ltd.’s antirock (“Embrace Your Decay”), the Teardrop Explodes’ noirish new wave (“We Celebrate Your Mistakes”), Guided by Voices’ Who fixation (“Objects in the Mirror”) and the Violent Femmes’ folk punk (“LCD”), the Statistics’ stripped back and sinewy pop/punk is shot through with adrenaline and perspective.
By Brian Baker
The Gutter Twins: Saturnalia The long awaited debut from Greg Dulli and Mark Lanegan
Order CD at Amazon.com
