Afghan Whigs Seduce With Soul-Funk

“You for love?” asked Afghan Whigs singer-guitarist Greg Dulli, teasing the hip El Rey Theatre audience on Friday. “You’re not all fake and plastic, like they say on TV?” Love was the featured emotion throughout the group’s first of two sold-out nights. But to this band, romance all boiled down to the physical act.

For nearly two hours, Dulli huskily begged and bragged, wiggling his hips and exercising his remarkable talent for being both victim and aggressor at once. Backed by a keyboardist, percussion and backup singers, he and the rest of the Whigs drove an undulating soul-funk juggernaut that owed much to traditional R&B;, but spun a modern twist with elastic, gritty alternative-rock guitar work.

Repeatedly underscoring their stylistic debts, the players opened with Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” and encored with the Rolling Stones’ “Beast of Burden.”

Sweating under pulsating violet lights, they tore through most of their current album, “1965,” plus older selections, continually building up a lurid tension that promised a huge release.

Yet that release never came. It might have been impossible to provide a catharsis intense enough, but catharsis wasn’t even the point. Dulli sang like a man nearly drowning in desire, yet you sensed he didn’t really want to be rescued. Because, as all tortured romantics know, the ecstasy was in the agony.