Afghan Whigs: Black Love (Elektra Entertainment)

THIS CINCINNATI band was several Sub Pop records and many more feverish live dates into a career when its soulful experiments cohered into Gentlemen. By that time, it happened to be 1993, so the songs' crack guitar-architecture behaved with the expected distorted-post-Nirvana involvement. Yet everything else about singer and songwriter Greg Dulli's band seemed less literally generic: the cinematic drifts, the actorly immersions, the disregard for metal, the uncanny union with '60s and '70s R&B.