The sound of an enchanted dusk, swirling clouds of glittering mist, the fantastical landscape that comes after dark... When Greg Dulli of grungers Afghan Whigs and his twilight singing compadres (including dance duo Fila Brazillia) recorded the beginning and end tracks of their debut album between sunset and sunrise in New Orleans, the South's magic and the night's spirit somehow made their way in and floated round the gaps.
This is music for the soul - and soul music: a bewitching opus of lush orchestration, strings and saxes, eerie blues breathing hoodoo, tales of heartbreak and pain - a testament to Dulli's hanging out in seedy bars listening to Allen Toussaint covers.
Opener 'The Twilite Kid', and the reggae rhythms of 'Love' wrap you in the same sort of warm loneliness that the non rock-outs of the Smashing Pumpkins' 'Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness' do. But they're nothing to the unfathomable beauty of 'Clyde's eerie sitar harmonies (which Dulli, perhaps disingenuously, claims is about his cat) and 'That's Just How That Bird Sings' - a yearning, acoustic ballad about the lovesick, given, as elsewhere, its final gloss by the Singers' fondness for the contrasting vocals of a grizzled Whig and the higher pitched Harold Chichester and Pigeonhed's Shawn Smith.
However, it's not all indulgent melancholia, for Dulli touches far enough on the satirical - see the barfly funk of 'Annie Mae' with its lyrics of desperate excess ("God, you look fine Annie/Have you got a line Annie?") - to stop you wallowing completely.
'Twilight' is a record to play when the inanities and insanities of the day to day are too real, when you need a chance to recapture life's infinite possibilities, a record for dreamers and lovers, the content and the distressed. The words "everything's gonna be alright" close the album in a hypnotic mantra - trite yes, but having listened, you're inclined to believe.
