For the lazy journalist, the Cincinnati rock band the Afghan Whigs are “the Motown Nirvana”, a combination of soul melodies and post-grunge guitar squall. For the casual observer, their sharp suits, unashamed showmanship and, at times, downright funky sound represent a clean break from the alternative-rock peer group they themselves have described as “slovenly”.

Their fourth album, Gentlemen, from 1993, was a stifling mesh of Jacobean jealousy and infidelity; in it their musical influences finally gelled and their charismatic frontman, Greg Dulli, an uncommonly articulate square-jawed young Robert De Niro, first found his personal voice. It describes the ugly collapse of a once-treasured relationship and is an uncomfortable, even embarrassing, listen. But was Gentlemen really the naked confessional it seemed, or just the posturing of an admittedly skilful character actor?

“Well, I have been an actor in the past,” admits Dulli, a former film student, “but there are songs from Gentlemen I won’t sing any more. To go on stage and plumb those depths, without feeling it, would seem maudlin and arrogant and disrespectful to a precious memory.”

There is a verse in When We Two Parted that begins: “I should have seen this s coming down the hall, every night I spent in that bed with you facing the wall.” As Dulli growls out the words, there are couples in every Whigs live audience shifting uneasily on their feet in half-recognition of a shame they’ve clocked but never discussed. “Yeah, I accidentally stumbled on a truism and didn’t realise it until I heard it back. That was the one that really got my ex.”

Going to Town, on the new LP, Black Love (out now on Mute Records), was a breakthrough song for Dulli. It describes two lovers driving away from the small town they have just torched, and was his first lyric that wasn’t based on personal experience. “I never burnt down a town,” he protests.

The new album attempts to put a respectful distance between his writing and his life. “People were maybe hurt by some of what I’ve written before. A lot of Gentlemen was spiteful and childish. This time, I’m holding my cards a little closer. I’m finding I can inhabit songs rather than live them.”

Maybe the territory mapped by America’s best young songwriters reflects that of its greatest modern novelists, the “dirty realists”. But while Dulli was once, like the late Charles Bukowski, nobly bearing the burden of drunken misanthropy on our behalf, he isn’t yet the late Raymond Carver, giving voice to the hopes and fears of others. Black Love suffers lyrically because of this, it is never as focused or consistent as Gentlemen.

Musically, though, the band continues to develop. Blame Etc adds a funky wah-wah Isaac Hayes-style sound to the band’s canon. The Afghan Whigs are among a minority of groups that can plunder the sounds of the past and transcend pastiche, somehow retaining an emotional, irony-free core. The Britpop band Blur, for example, are so musically knowing and so lyrically self-conscious that if they were ever to have a genuine feeling, they’d find themselves stylistically denied the tools to articulate it.

Recently, Dulli turned up at a photo session black-eyed and bruised. The night before, he had got into a fight in a London hotel bar, and the press cuttings say he beat a guy with a chair “until he stopped moving”. “I have a temper,” he admits. “It’s been a problem. I regret the incident now and I’ve been advised not to speak about it.” Someone, somewhere must have imagined the subsequent photos would add a level of integrity to Dulli’s wounded-lover persona. Instead, they are caricatured and crass. And a black eye isn’t such an impressive badge of honour in rock’n’roll terms anyway. After all, the bluesman Robert Johnson was killed by a jealous cuckold.

“I just showed up at the photo session to honour a commitment and I could see them thinking, “Hey, we got a live one here!”’ recalls Dulli. “But I played a willing part in it. That photo… it’s a photo of an immature person… I coulda been killed and it would have been my fault.”

The Scottish space-rock band the Telstar Ponies have an obscure early B-side called Thanks But No Thanks Mr Dulli, an elliptical, but apparently vindictive, attack on the hapless American. Their gleeful press release said it described a failed chat-up attempt by Dulli. “They say I tried to hit on one of their girlfriends, but I don’t remember anything about it,” he says. “Maybe I’ll learn the song and perform it on tour,” he adds. “Sometimes, one has to laugh in the face of the aggressor rather than throw a fist at him.” Dulli is growing up.