Love connection

Like Elvis Costello, Whigs lead vocalist Greg Dulli has a knack for taking old songs and refashioning them into expressions not just of love and desire but of thinly veiled treachery: for Dulli, the tender trap is more like a belt of rusty chains wrapped tight, and he needs to be ready to weasel out at a moment's notice. The Whigs are in love with Motown and Philly Soul, with Curtis Mayfield and Otis Redding, but they're not content to reinterpret old songs just for the love of them. They want to color the heart of the sound blacker, like a disturbed kid bearing down with a black Crayola.

In light of those old songs, both the title and the recurring themes of Black Love make perfect sense. And though few of the songs here have the weird intensity of those covers -- and though Dulli's lyrics are often too opaque or overwrought to have much effect, and don't mesh as well with the music as they did on Gentlemen -- Black Love is exhilarating and scary by virtue of its sound alone. For one thing, it's a bigger-sounding album than Gentlemen. The Whigs are equally at ease with blaxploitation-flick wah-wah effects (on the bitterly exuberant "Blame, Etc.") and huge orchestral waves ("Night by Candlelight"), and Dulli's go-for-broke vocals sound less restrained, more pushed to the limit, than ever. Supercharged, multitextured guitars (played by Dulli and Rick McCollum) fuel "My Enemy" and "Honky's Ladder"; their sound is soft and padded on the ballad "Step into the Light."

Black Love always seems focused and energized. The lyrics may be the only thing significantly wrong with it. Dulli often clutches at drama -- "If you pretend, then I imitate/My friend, come crucify my heart" -- as if he didn't realize that understatement is his sharpest weapon. His simpler lyrics hit the mark pretty squarely: "Do you think I'm beautiful? Or do you think I'm evil?" he asks in "Crime Scene Part One," unwittingly giving away the answer in his voice. He's as seductive as the devil, of course, but too tortured to be truly evil. What's more, his voice is scraped so raw that all its duplicity -- as much as his words assure us that it's still there -- has fallen away in scraps.

Dulli's a strange one, all right -- slightly baroque and down-to-earth at the same time. He's impossibly sexy, a cross between John Shaft and a Victorian villain. In "Going to Town," he asks his girl on a date to -- what else? -- burn down the town, and it's an offer impossible to refuse: "Get your stroll on, baby/I'll get the car/You get the match/And gasoline." The music of "Night by Candlelight" suits his weird contradictions perfectly: a passage defined by a fragile-sounding hammered dulcimer rolls its way into a crash of cello and timpani. "Am I vain? Have I shame?/Are my thoughts of a man/Who can call himself sane?" he sings. The words have a top-hat-and-walking-stick formality, but he roughs them up, turning them into an elegant kind of street language.

On Black Love, Dulli further explores his fascination with lies and deceit, reminding us that he believes more in the damning power of love than in its power to redeem. Again, though, his voice always tells the real story. On what may be his best song -- Gentlemen's "What Jail Is Like," one of the darkest songs about relationships ever written -- he claims that he'll scratch his "way out of this pen, again." He refuses to be contained, and he says it loud. But on Black Love's desperately beautiful "Bulletproof," as he stretches out the word "love," calling out to his inamorata as if from the inside of a nightmare, his voice seems to change shape like a demon lover. Dulli may fear and revile love, but he needs it like water. The proof, and it's something he can't hide unless he finds a new line of work, is that he's willing to shred his voice to ribbons over it. Screams speak louder than words.