The Twilight Singers – Dynamite Steps (Sub Pop)
It’s no secret that adolescence can be a trying ordeal. Whatever sheltering embrace childhood might have provided falls away like dead leaves in the autumn, laying bare the first indications of the capricious cruelty and unyielding disappointment that life holds in store. It is little surprise, then, that something of a cottage industry has built up around the sort of maudlin, self-engaged sentimentality that comes part and parcel with attempts to cope with these experiences. The “woe is me” song has been an integral part of youth culture since its inception. From “I Started A Joke” to the more dewy-eyed moments of Sinatra’s crooning, from Morrissey’s navel-gazing to the histrionic warble of Conor Oberst, these songs provide a vicarious catharsis, an emotional connection that empowers the listener in his or her belief that nobody has ever suffered quite as they have, that their travails are unique and soul-rendingly deep.
The Twilight Singers – Dynamite Steps (Sub Pop)
It’s no secret that adolescence can be a trying ordeal. Whatever sheltering embrace childhood might have provided falls away like dead leaves in the autumn, laying bare the first indications of the capricious cruelty and unyielding disappointment that life holds in store. It is little surprise, then, that something of a cottage industry has built up around the sort of maudlin, self-engaged sentimentality that comes part and parcel with attempts to cope with these experiences. The “woe is me” song has been an integral part of youth culture since its inception. From “I Started A Joke” to the more dewy-eyed moments of Sinatra’s crooning, from Morrissey’s navel-gazing to the histrionic warble of Conor Oberst, these songs provide a vicarious catharsis, an emotional connection that empowers the listener in his or her belief that nobody has ever suffered quite as they have, that their travails are unique and soul-rendingly deep.
Then (hopefully) we grow up, disregarding the quasi-solipsism of youthful angst and coming to the understanding that our problems are, in the grand scheme of things, largely insignificant. Life almost never gets simpler or easier and few people have any support for the idea that their pain is at all notable. It is upon the resulting malaise that Greg Dulli has based much of his oeuvre. His is a world of shadowy characters and ill intent, a world whose few pleasures are fleeting and whose faint glimmers come intertwined with resigned sighs. It’s rich territory that Dulli has mined over the past quarter century with a handful of bands; with the bleak soul-punk hybrid of the Afghan Whigs, whose output is among the strongest and most consistent of any indie rock band of their era; with the Gutter Twins, a collaboration with Mark Lanegan of the Screaming Trees, whose 2008 album Saturnalia ranks among the best releases of the decade; and with the Twilight Singers, a group whose approach may be gentler than his other projects but is in no way kinder.
Dynamite Steps, the band’s most recent effort, bases itself on one of Dulli’s least appreciated facets–his ability to incorporate elements which might be considered schmaltzy or trite in less capable hands, and to imbue them with weight simply by the understated force of his performance. A song like “Get Lucky,” replete with minor-key piano figures and a weepy string section, could easily fall into cheap sentimentality. Instead, it survives on a world-weariness that seems neither contrived nor disingenuous. “I get lucky sometimes,” Dulli croons during the song’s chorus, the line possessing a mixture of half-hearted sexual innuendo and an unreliable narrator’s unconvincing attempt to accentuate the positive. Even the canned applause at the end fails to drag it into the realms of the contrived, as its truncated brevity is more disorienting than anything. Taken individually, these elements might seem substantially less than inspired, but as an accumulated whole, the song is more than the sum of its parts, an assessment that could apply to any of the album’s content. Which is not to say, however, that the music dwells in some muted comfort zone.
Whereas previous Twilight Singers albums seemed like a subdued version of the music Dulli had created in previous bands, Dynamite Steps displays a willingness to move into different realms, to emphasize the peaks and valleys of both the sonic environment and the emotional tenor. There are quieter moments, to be sure, but songs like “Waves” and “Never Seen No Devil” are easily the most aggressive material Dulli has penned since the heyday of the Afghan Whigs. Similarly, the album displays a widening of his narrative scope. He’s never shied away from plumbing humanity’s depths, but there is a stronger attempt to grasp varied extremes of human behavior–while there are certainly some classic snarling Dulli-isms (“spread your legs and insert your alibi” is a favorite), it is of no small significance that the album’s first line is “whenever you’re here, you’re alive.” This lyric is a nod to the sort of redemptive power to be drawn from location, an externalized deliverance that most songwriters would ignore in favor of the more easily captured internal monologue. A quasi-cinematic sense of place permeates the songs–the liner notes refer to the album having been “shot on location” rather than captured in a recording studio–a reference to another of Dulli’s strengths: his ability to concoct worlds with just the tiniest slivers of experience, pasting together shards of suffering and triumph, of catharsis and despair, into a mosaic that may at times seem to dwell on the uglier facets of human experience, but allows for the possibility (though rarely the likelihood) of transcendence.
It would have been easy for Greg Dulli the songwriter to fall back on Greg Dulli the persona–the Prince-by-way-of-Bob-Mould voice, the film noir narrator’s view of humanity, the aptitude for punchy one-liners–but he has chosen a trickier path, and one that is ultimately more satisfying. One of the hallmarks of maturity is the ability to learn from one’s past and to move forward, bearing that retrospective analysis to illuminate the future’s uncertainties. And just as Dulli has been able to provide music that casts a piercing gaze on all the moments that most people would prefer to forget, he has been able to mine the most salient elements of his earlier work and to move forward–maturing without softening, learning from the past without repeating it.
