It’s a little jarring that bands that reached their heights in the ’90s are now mounting 40th anniversary tours. Just as we’ve gotten used to grey hairs bopping to ’60s and ’70s revivalists, there are throngs wagging their white-haired heads to the anthems from out of the grunge-era Clinton Administration—and sometimes bringing their kids along so they can witness in person the bands that dad used to blast from the CD player.
That was the scene when The Afghan Whigs played a packed 9:30 Club in Washington last week, their first return there in years, with Mercury Rev opening.
It was a loud, roaring show from the Whigs—with decibels so cranked it threatened to blow hats off. And in place of a tour built around a new release, this one was well balanced over their career, though there was a hint of their next steps with a couple of songs from an album due later this year, the piano-led “Duvateen,” definitely an outlier from all the guitar-driven rock, and the menacing “House of I” with its insidious “Sympathy for the Devil” style doo-doo’s.
Just two original members remain in the Whigs, frontman and driving force Greg Dulli and bassist John Curley, and each carries the well-groomed grey of grizzled grunge-era veterans. Their age (early 60s) is contrasted by the relative youth of the current members, from the behatted Christopher Thorn of Blind Melon on guitar, and the versatile Rick G. Nelson on keyboards, strings, and fiddle, to newly added drummer Bryan Lee Brown (replacing Patrick Keeler, busy working with Jack White’s band).
Guest vocalist Steve Myers didn’t seem to be adding much to the handful of songs he joined in on. The Whigs have always distinguished themselves as more attuned to the soul that grooves unexpectedly in Ohio. But that comes largely from Dulli’s strong, wide-ranging voice, adding some muscle and nuance where other rockers would blare it out.
He also likes to place his work into the context of broader music, so he often inserts quotes from other songs, with Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” at the end of “66,” to The Doors’ “Roadhouse Blues” intersecting “Son of the South,” and was that a snippet of the Eagles’ “I Can’t Tell You Why” slipping out to end another song?
While the setlist touched on eight different albums, the best represented were two from earlier this century, the 2014 comeback Do to the Beast and 2017’s In Spades, each represented with four tracks. There were just two from their last one, 2022’s How Do You Burn? The best reactions in the hard-driving show came from ’90s anthems like “Going to Town” and “My Enemy” from Black Love, and “What Jail is Like” from Gentlemen.
The band opted to join that growing trend of eliminating the encore altogether, essentially saying, “this is where the show would end,” but proceeding with the final few songs without the pretense of leaving the stage and returning. It just kept the pace going for an already driving show.
In a way, the pairing with Mercury Rev seemed incongruous. Though both bands rose in the same era, Mercury Rev’s settled sound was lighter, dreamier, and more cosmic. Yet their stage show, as seen a year ago in a headlining stop at the smaller Atlantis club next door, adds a booming grandeur that makes them hard to ignore.
Still, you’d have to strain to hear individual notes from originating guitarist Sean “Grasshopper” Mackowiak, who instead conjured shimmering tones and effects to mesh with the double bank of synths from Marion Genser and Jesse Chandler. With drummer Joe Magistro holding it down with booming precision, it was up to pixie-like frontman Jonathan Donahue to forge a mystical path. His keening tenor is distinct in rock, and in his trademark coat and cap, he often turned to conduct the terrific noise that rose behind him.
Rather than the straight-ahead, half-lit presentation of the headliners, Mercury Rev would occasionally disappear in a blast of theatrical fog. Its DIY light show had projectors pinpointing out into the crowd in starbursts (and, at one point, directly at listeners when Donahue lifted one device and pointed it around).
Soaring anthems dominated their succinct set from their 1998 masterpiece Deserter’s Songs, but also surprised people when they included, halfway through, a cover of Traffic’s “Low Spark of High Heeled Boys,” which somehow fit right in.
