Caught in the Carousel

The Twilight Singers

Dynamite Steps
Sub Pop

Twilight Singers

If Elvis Presley was the King of Rock and Roll, Greg Dulli is its Count of Monte Cristo: he's dark and driven, he's compassionate but cunning, and, on the latest Twilight Singers album, he's back with a vengeance. Dynamite Steps is a musically and lyrically complex exploration of how human machinations function under fire.

Like the fictional Edmond Dantès, Dulli boasts an impressive and complicated (musical) past. Before he founded The Twilight Singers, he was best-known for his work with The Afghan Whigs, a band that fused the loud sounds and minor tonality of grunge rock with the heartbreak beats of Motown soul and R&B. The Afghan Whigs offered their listeners unflinching examinations of loaded social topics—murder, suicide, infidelity, religion, and drug abuse, to name a few—delivered in Dulli's unmistakably dolorous voice and set against a backdrop of heavy rhythm and humming guitars. Founded in the late 1980s, the band released five EPs and six full-length studio albums. These releases included the soul covers EP Uptown Avondale (1992); the angry, seminal Gentlemen (1993); the evocative, epic Black Love (1996); and the hypnotic, kink-laced 1965 (1998). The Afghan Whigs disbanded in 2001 (to reunite briefly, but not permanently, in 2006) after several years of dealing with label issues and too much geographic distance between the band's members.

Fortunately for Greg Dulli's fans, he'd already been working on a side project with singer-songwriters Harold Chichester (of Royal Crescent and Howlin' Maggie) and Shawn Smith (of Bird, Satchel, and Pigeonhed). Dulli, Chichester, and Smith then teamed up with drummer Steve Cobby and several others; their first album, Twilight as Played by the Twilight Singers, was released in 2000. This work in some ways foreshadowed The Afghan Whigs' imminent demise. On the opening track, “The Twilite Kid,” Dulli croons, “Rock steady baby, your man iz ded,” then continues with an admonition that could be interpreted as a nod to The Afghan Whigs' label problems: “Be careful, sugar, of who you call a friend / cuz they'll get you in the end.” A little bit burnt but a lot talented, The Twilight Singers transported Greg Dulli out of The Afghan Whigs' ashes to fly in a new artistic direction. The Twilight Singers followed Twilight as Played by the Twilight Singers with the elegiac Blackberry Belle 2003), the eclectic covers project She Loves You (2004), the gritty Powder Burns (2006), the EP A Sitch in Time (2006), and—after a long wait, Dynamite Steps. Like the Afghan Whigs, The Twilight Singers rely heavily on minor tonality and plangent screaming, but overall, their sound is much more obviously sculpted. Echoes of what Request reviewer Harold DeMuir once referred to as.”The Afghan Whigs'... nasty guitar noises” resurface in The Twilight Singers' work, but they've softened somewhat and appear mostly in the forms of mild distortion and occasional feedback. Where The Afghan Whigs once drove home a message with merciless (albeit carefully crafted) dissonance, The Twilight Singers now use plaintive vocal harmony to tease it out.

Dynamite Steps employs exactly this sort of slow aural burn. Dulli's voice—sometimes firm and steady; sometimes dipping, deceptively, into quavering atonality—is the fuse around which the album is built. This lit filament travels through a variety of musical landscapes. Past Twilight Singers (Scott Ford, Mike Napolitano, Dave Rosser, Matthias Schneeberger, and Jon Skibic) play on the album, along with a number of guest musicians. The backing vocals—by artists as varied and illustrious as Joseph Arthur, Ani DiFranco, and Mark Lanegan—support Greg Dulli's voice so seamlessly that they practically become glued to it. Lanegan's baritone weaves in and out of “Be Invited,” lending extra weight to the song's refrain. DiFranco's usually distinctive, lilting vocal style becomes almost indiscrete as it blends with and slips behind Dulli's sonorous singing on “Blackbird and the Fox.” The way in which Dulli's voice and the backing vocals cling together against a shifting instrumental background is what makes Dynamite Steps the murkiest Twilight Singers release yet. Classical instruments set off the evocative moments of “Blackbird and the Fox” and “Get Lucky,” while synth instruments (Mellotron, Rhodes) perform that function in “Last Night in Town,” “Waves,” and “The Beginning of the End.” Folk instruments also make an appearance: “Never Seen No Devil” opens with eerie harmona by Joseph Arthur and features Joshua Blanchard, a musician capable of making a dobro sound almost like a sitar.

Lyrically, Dynamite Steps also constantly surprises the listener; one thing quickly becomes another over a song's course. In “The Beginning of the End,” the line “the summer sun is blind and inveterate” maintains its meter but changes its meaning when it becomes “the summer sun has died of irrelevance.” The “dark circles around your body” in “Be Invited” turn into a crime scene (a familiar topic in Dulli's work) marked by “chalk circles around your body.” The album's characters inhabit a liminal world marked by mortal danger and sexual violence, and they both struggle against and mirror its instability. Predators lurk everywhere: in “Blackbird and the Fox,” “They'll come as your friend and they'll warn you/ About all the rats in the barn / Come closer and when they disarm you- / They'll ask you to sit in the front of their car.” Dulli's description of a contemporary abduction scenario makes the threat of harm real and chilling—“Cold blooded, but some like it freezing,” he sings—but his use of religious imagery and mythology in other songs also reminds the listener that humans have enjoyed a long, rich tradition of injuring each other. “On the Corner” begins with a reference to the Biblical Gomorrah, where sexual indiscretion leads to ruin: “desire / the liar / becomes divider … A handsome man he was- / The situation turned.” Dulli rewrites the Old Testament story, however, by suggesting that sexuality isn't the problem—it's the solution. He makes the abstract concept of defense graphically physical—“Spread your legs/ insert your alibi”—and also eroticizes the imagery of New Testament redemption: “I'll ride alone, I'll take your place... Come taste the body, come on / Come waste the body, come on / Blood ties the body to the Son.”

The characters in the songs on Dynamite Steps form shaky, power-infused, fraught alliances with each other against the world in which they live. “But should you stay and should you fight/ You'll see me there,” one character informs another in “Last Night in Town.” Throughout “Gunshots,” two people flee together from a mutual assailant—“Gunshots, baby/ Let's cut through the crowd,” drawls Dulli on the song's refrain—but also struggle against each other, wounding each other almost much as the outside world does them. In “The Beginning of the End,” the narrator chastises and rescues a lover simultaneously: “I see your ass has gone astray / You've lost your way / Come find your way.” The characters defend themselves against each other even as they defend each other from the world. But lying defensively only makes the narrator more vulnerable in “Gunshots”: “As I began to deceive you / I held your hand in thrall.” In “Blackbird and the Fox,” the lines “Just when you've forsaken me / That's when I turn my blinders on” make it unclear whether the narrator is retaliating against his lover or driving up, high beams blazing, to rescue her from her assailants.

Like Gentlemen, the more the characters in Dynamite Steps argue with, manipulate, and abandon each other, the more interdependent they become. However, Dulli's characterization of interdependence has changed a great deal since the violently defensive Gentlemen, with its relentless drumming and its truncated lyrics thrown like punches at the listener. Dulli's characters are as screwy and dysfunctional as ever, but they've also matured enough to have moments of genuine altruism and deep emotional intimacy. Against a backdrop of lulling piano chords at the beginning of “Get Lucky,” Dulli asks, “And tell me does it scare you / when I look the other way / and thru the walls into your very soul?” Set against a backdrop of carnage and decay, such moments of tranquil, easy communication between characters seem stunning and almost supernatural. Sings Dulli: “I get lucky sometimes / Once you know the way down / The path belongs to you.” With a certainty that's as gentle as it is graphic, Dynamite Steps leads the listener further into Dulli's inferno.

—Christine Fort