For all the fury on display here, this is a very moody and mature album. Whereas once they might have simply thrashed out and to hell with the consequences, here, every note, every beat and every riffs has been worked to the bone and made to earn its place amongst a magnificent coterie of sounds. What keeps it exciting is that they still have the anger. It seethes, hisses and pops out of this album’s every pore.
You keep on expecting Greg Dulli to jump out of your speakers (or your headphones, depending upon your listening preference) and start poking you in the chest, to get all his points right across. Clearly, this man has things to say and ten years away from the recording studio has only made him all the madder. It’s as though he suddenly came to at the start of 2014 and has turbo charged himself to make up for lost time.
It’s worked as unlike a lot of comeback albums by their contemporaries, Do To The Beast really gels as an album. Tracks such as ‘It Kills’, ‘Parked Outside’ and ‘These Sticks’ are all of one colour but each brings their own distinctive hue to the party. This means the album knows when to work you up, when to give you breathing space and when to hit you right between the eyes with a true lyrical stinger.
In today’s comfortable music world of complacency, reunions and false nostalgia, Afghan Whigs are not so much raging against the dying of the light as storming right into it with a neon flare.
