The Afghan Whigs - Gentlemen [Indie Exclusive]

Greg Dulli spent the early nineties insisting that the Afghan Whigs were a soul band who happened to own distortion pedals, and Gentlemen is where that claim stopped sounding like a joke. Released by Elektra in October 1993, it is a breakup record that refuses to let anyone off the hook, least of all its narrator, and it arrived at the exact moment the major labels were signing anything from a college radio station and hoping for another Nevermind. They did not get one. They got something meaner.

The album was recorded largely at Ardent Studios in Memphis with Dulli producing, and the Memphis air is all over it: the horn-adjacent swing of "Be Sweet," the slow burn of "When We Two Parted," the way Rick McCollum's guitar keeps circling rather than resolving. "Debonair" and the title track were the singles and remain the entry points, but the record's real center is "My Curse," where Dulli hands the lead vocal to Marcy Mays of Scrawl because, by his own account, the words were too ugly to sing himself. Bob Ludwig mastered it. Harold Chichester's piano and mellotron do quiet, devastating work throughout.

Three decades on it stands as the definitive Afghan Whigs statement and one of the few albums of its era that has aged into something more uncomfortable rather than less.

This Elektra 75 anniversary edition presses the album on canary yellow vinyl at Memphis Record Pressing, cut for Rhino and issued with a paper lyric insert. An indie retail exclusive.