4 keepers
keeper avg .400
Like the previous album the only original Whigs are leader Greg Dulli and bassist John Curley, but with a wide sampling of 70's rock and soul it's Dulli's best effort since "1965," all the way back in 1998. Skipping "Birdland," which is more of a hiccup slash fart than a song, the album starts in earnest with "Arabian Heights"****, like Saturday Night Fever performed by Kiss, stomping out a dance groove with their platforms. The foreboding "Demon In Profile"***** ups the ante dramatically, building to a monster "chorus" driven by horns and clanging ride before pulling back to regain composure.
All the songs stick to a simple premise, with few bridges or detours, and as confirmed by the lyric sheet the alt-rock-y "Toy Automatic" and "Oriole" are especially sketchy. "The Spell" ("see-hee-hee the light, bee-hee-hee the light") and "Light As A Feather" explore flavors of soul, the mellow former with cranked-up electric piano, the funky latter with chicka-chicka guitar drones, one of Dulli's favorite moves. "Copernicus"**** separates these pairs, reveling in 70's rock excess with an arena-rock stomp beat and talk-box guitar.
The album winds down with two ballads. "I Got Lost" is on the Aerosmith-poppy side, similar to "You See My Crying" or "Amazing," but the album closes with the forlorn, aching "Into The Floor"**** (I remember you always this way), ending dramatically like "Faded" from Black Love. Though these songs, like the rest of the album, are structurally simple Dulli excels with dynamics and layers of sound. Due to the wide variety and modest length of the songs they fit together well into a continuous song cycle that adds up to more than the sum of their parts; it feels much more consistent when listened to this way rather than focusing on one particular song.
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