Drummer Steve Earle is crucial to this balance of styles and sounds, keeping time as tight as the great Al Jackson Jr. On later albums, these sources would become much more obvious, but on Gentlemen they are buried in the mix, evident in the strangled riffs on the title track and in the sensual drift of “When We Two Parted”. While their contemporaries drew from indie bands like the Raincoats and the Meat Puppets or from classic rock acts like the Who and Neil Young, Dulli was much more interested in Stax and Motown, in Curtis Mayfield and Isaac Hayes. The band had previously covered Al Green’s “Beware” and the Elvis hit “True Love Travels on a Gravel Road”, and they chose Tyrone Davis’ “I Keep Coming Back” for Gentlemen, proving their well of influences went much deeper than the usual alt-rock fare. The Afghan Whigs had long been incorporating the sounds and fashions of black soul, funk, and jazz into their buzzy indie rock, which lent previous albums like 1990’s Up in It and 1992’s Congregation a sense of taut rhythmic urgency. Roebling Suspension Bridge in the band’s hometown of Cincinnati. Memphis figures prominently on Gentlemen, even if the album opens with the buzz of car wheels on the John A. And the bonus demos and covers reveal the DNA of the album, signaling not only the rock and R&B sources that inspired Dulli, but also giving some insight into the band’s creative process before they trekked down to Ardent Studio in Memphis, Tennessee. The album sounds sharper and a bit more dangerous, those coiled guitars riffs more potent and Steve Earle’s drums wilder and more insistent. Gentlemen at 21 offers some fresh insights into this song cycle, but fortunately doesn’t remaster or repackage the mystery out of it. Removed from the alt-rock boom of the early '90s, Gentlemen is both personal and unknowable, cocksure yet deeply troubled-in other words, so complicated and contradictory that we’re still trying to untangle its knots. Perhaps that’s why the album still sounds so vital and so fresh 21 years on. Offering a new perspective on the album’s brutal sexual politics, Mays reveals his outsize persona to be a ruse: a defense mechanism with which he can refract emotions too dark and messy and traumatic to face head on. “Temptation comes not from hell but from above.” It is, to say the least, a powerful moment, but it also fulfills an important narrative function: If Gentlemen documents the demise of a romance, then “My Curse” allows the woman to tell her own side of the story, to call out the posturing in Dulli’s hyper-masculine lyrics, to express explicitly the pain he is inflicting on her. “Curse softly to me, baby, and smother me in your love,” she all but begs, as though she must summon the courage to get each syllable out of her mouth.

Marcy mays scrawl