Do the beast

To be perfectly honnest, I had no idea who the Afghan Whigs were untill recently. Listening to Algiers in preview, I had the feeling of a War On Drugs -only less whiny and raunchier - kind of thing: gently weeping on a folk guitar, with increasingly thicker sounds in the background and a greasy guitar coming in from time to time. But altogether, it sound definitely utterly like a fresh new band.

Because I'm a conscious person, I've done my research and this band has been here for YEARS! And nobody told me about it before now! How sad! Well, my excuse would be that their last album was released when I was 13 and still crying over the fallout of most of the boysband of my youth while listening to bad RnB.

I'm currently catching up with their whole discography and am thoroughly delighted. In the meantime, I won't hold back about Do the Beast, which is just humongous. It begins with a badass rock piece, the one you smell on the back of the parking lot of a dirty dive-bar in Arkansas, Parked Outside

But then it goes to much more soft songs, including the Algiers that fooled me and other amazing stuffs. It kills is a kind of bittersweet breaking up song, almost whispered  with a piano base and background vocals that would look ridiculous anywhere else (think Diana Ross), but its weird mix is somehow bewitching.

Lost in the wood is probably my favourite song - probably the closest to the WOD kind of feeling I had at first. The inclusion of big cellos, expanded into a minor mode bridge is moving the core of the melody from just another love song to a much deeper and darker register.

Car rova is another changing song: from an Arcade Fire "let"s take a car and run" start, it explodes into an almost disco beat suddenly, yet it's totally coherent and logical. I have not idea how they do that.

And then there's Royal Cream, that's mostly reminding me of my good old day of grunge/rock/whatever. It's muddy with roaring despair - yet there's a violin in the distance (or is there?).