Pitchfork

Greg Dulli gets a bad rap for supposedly exaggerating the emotional and sexual anguish of 1960s soul and r&b like the Supremes ("My World Is Empty Without You") and Freda Payne ("Band of Gold"), but over the past couple of years with the Twilight Singers, he has covered a range of current songs by TV on the Radio ("Wolf Like Me") and Gnarls Barkley ("Crazy") that show how deep those dark themes run through popular music (in fact, the Afghan Whigs' catalog is scattered with contemporary covers like TLC's "Creep" and Hole's "Miss World"). Dulli isn't showing how dark these new songs are-- everyone already knows that "Wolf Like Me" is tortured and "Crazy" conflicted-- nor is he testifying to his own soiled soul. Instead, in connecting to the present the same way he connected to the past, Dulli is providing a continuous context for his own music, perhaps even pointing out how similar he is to other artists.

In this regard, José González's spare "Down the Line", from In Our Nature, now streaming at the Twilight Singers' MySpace page, proves to be a perfect cover for Dulli. Performing a show under his own name at the Triple Door in Seattle, Dulli and his band (including Petra Haden and Jeff Klein) fill out González's tense strums with piano and violin, building gradually throughout the song as a promise for a big Singers-style climax at the end, a culmination of all that sexual tension. "I see trouble down the line," Dulli sings, but the trouble never comes. Nor does resolution. The song just keeps spiraling at its maddening midtempo, quietly unraveling as Dulli tenderly yet menacingly repeats the line "Don't let the darkness eat you up."

Stream:> The Twilight Singers: "Down the Line"
[original track from José González's In Our Nature; out now on Mute]