Track Listing

1. If I Were Going
2. Gentlemen
3. Be Sweet
4. Debonair
5. When We Two Parted
6. Fountain And Fairfax
7. What Jail Is Like
8. My Curse
9. Now You Know
10. I Keep Coming Back
11. Brother Woodrow/Closing Prayer

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #31142 in Music
• Released on: 1999-11-01
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
The album on which Cincinnati's finest came into their own, melding their unique blend of white grunge angst and dark, horny soul. Singer/songwriter Greg Dulli had always shown a fascination for Sixties Stax music. The Whigs' previous EP, Uptown Avondale, featured covers of old soul songs like "Come See About Me" rendered in Dulli's typically torn-up guitar style. On Gentlemen, he writhes in the dilemma between his lust and his low self-esteem for being such a slave to his basest urges: "Ladies and gentlemen . . .I have a dick for a brain", he sings on "Be Sweet", while on the title track he declares, "This time I go to hell/For what I did to you". It's an unusual twist on rock's usual self-pity and macho posturing, conveyed in a subtly wrought, white-hot guitar-driven style with a steamy, Southern-fried undertow. An album which burns brilliantly with lust, shame and defiance. --David Stubbs

Customer Reviews

"If I were going" to buy 1 album this year..
Superlatives are often thrown out ten a penny in modern society, but the only genuine superlative that can do this album justice is perfect. Published during the grunge years, it had scuzzed up feedback and screaming riffs alright, but was seemlessly blended with enough piano and orchestration to lift this away from an easy pigeonhole.

From the opening windswept introduction of "if I were going" to the string filled "closing prayer", this album works its way through a variety of disasterous relationships using a magnificent guitar led musical score and a vitriolic lead vocal. Switching from breathy whispers to hatred filled scream, Greg Dulli bares his soul on every record, his self loathing and discontentment partcularly evident on "Now you Know" and "If I were going". Marcy Mays vocal on "My Curse" also helps shows the female side, expressing the same desperation as Dulli and expelling any thoughts of this album being a mysoginistic diatribe.

If you've ever been unlucky enough to experience half of what the Afghan Whigs express on "Gentlemen", think yourself lucky that you've got this to listen to. If you consider yourself to be alternative in attitude, buy it.

Its perfect.

It is all true...
... the Whigs really were that good. If the prostpect of dirty, sleazy rock bursting with soul is at all interesting then buy all their albums.

Under-rated and overlooked classic
Without doubt one of the most under-rated bands of their era, The Afghan Whigs were unlucky enough to reach their peak when their Sub-Pop contemporaries were turning out formulaic tripe of the worst order and found themselves labelled "grunge". The fact that The Afghan Whigs shared nothing more than a label with mediocrities like Tad didn't matter. With this album and "Black Love" the Whigs found their creative and commercial peaks, unfortunately nobody seemed to care. The heart-broken soul lyrics and anxious rock backing combined to excellent effect the Whigs finest hour on Gentlemen, particularly "What Jail Is Like". After this they produced the mixed "1965" and finally split.

It seems unlikely that the Whigs will ever receive their proper dues. There won't be a "Pixies" style re-evaluation. Mojo won't devote a four page spread to the recording of "Gentlemen". That only leaves the records, which still sound as good ten years on. Not many of their more successful contemporaries can say that.