By: Pat O'Brien
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The Gutter Twins - Photo by Sam Holden from myspace.com/theguttertwins
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Several months ago, I attended a Velvet Revolver concert at the Xcel Center in St. Paul. They tout themselves as a supergroup but mostly they just reminded me of the bands they used to be in (Guns N’ Roses and Stone Temple Pilots) and gave the impression that they were just doing time in VR until something better came along, or their old bandmates decided that whatever they were doing wasn’t making them enough money and they needed to embark on a reunion tour (good luck, Slash and the rest of the Gunners). It was sort of sad and when they did a mini-set of songs from their former bands, it illustrated perfectly the reason I avoid “supergroups” as a rule.
The Gutter Twins, however, were (and should always be) an exception to this rule. Fronted by former Afghan Whigs and current Twilight Singers frontman Greg Dulli, and former Screaming Trees frontmanand frequent Queens Of The Stone Age collaborator Mark Lanegan, there was a sense of familiarity evident from the start (to The Twilight Singers, in particular), but it was darker, more foreboding, owing much of that to Lanegan’s guttural moan of a voice. An eerie tension was present in many of the songs, a tension that hung in the air and never fully dissipated until they had left the stage for the evening. With so many ‘90s alt-stalwarts still reveling in their old, now overripe glory or still trying to parlay their one big hit into a big paycheck, it was refreshing to see that neither Dulli or Lanegan were interested whether the crowd knew them from their former bands or not, they were now and forever The Gutter Twins, a compulsively smoking, subtly angry duo, bent on finding redemption for themselves. But the tales they spun, full of sin, hurt, damaged, wrong-headed love and lives on the edge of destruction aren’t likely to help that quest much. However, you got the sense that in the end maybe they just didn’t care if redemption ever came, being brooding, cranky badasses was just too much fun.
Many of their songs had that soul/blues/creeped-out electronica buzz that so many of The Twilight Singers songs do, with Dulli often playing the jilted lover/manipulative con-man playing on his lover’s weaknesses—the man so familiar to anyone who’s listened to The Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen—and Lanegan slipped into his role as the knives-out, world-weary cynic with ease. It took almost five years to bring their debut, Saturnalia, to fruition, and for once, the wait for an album seemed to be worth it. The set played out like the soundtrack to a film-noir directed by Quentin Tarantino, it all made perfect sense, just not in ways you expected it to.
It took weird, funky detours, Dulli manned the piano for a couple of songs and their encore lasted for nearly as long as their first set did. I went in hoping for a couple of Whigs songs (former Afghan Whigs guitarist Rick McCollum lives in Minneapolis and was in attendance) but by the end, it was obvious they had to completely avoid anything resembling nostalgia. This material is more than good enough to stand on its own; there would have been no need to mar the show with something like that. We have reunion tours for that kind of stuff and that schtick should stay within those boundaries. And while a tour from the original bands (or most of the band, in the Whigs’ case—none of them care to talk to Steven Earle these days) would be hot tickets in this town in particular, here’s hoping that neither Lanegan’s or Dulli’s former bandmates come calling for quite some time. The Gutter Twins had something special here, a rarity among supergroups. They may have needed their names to get people to show up at first, but they won’t need them to sell the material, and while it seems that both Dulli and Lanegan have been strip-mining their respective damaged psyches for going on 20 years each, there doesn’t seem to be any chance of running out of material.
Location Info:
First Avenue
Artist Info: The Gutter Twins
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