PRELUDE 12/21

When I told my partner that AFI was the next band to be covered for this series, her response was, “Really? AFI? Were they a band that you weren’t supposed to like?”

That question made me stop for a moment. I have a tendency to lump a lot of the Warped Tour/Taste of Chaos/mall emo scene together, both for pragmatic purposes and because a lot of the same people listened to all of those bands. But my partner is right: AFI was a little bit different. For a certain period of time, AFI were kind of considered the same way that bands like Thursday, Taking Back Sunday, Glassjaw, and Every Time I Die were: normies were into them, but it was okay for hardcore kids to get down with them too. However, sometime after 2003’s major label breakthrough Sing the Sorrow (and certainly by the time that “Miss Murder” was destroying the airwaves in 2006), AFI crossed a line. They were not only now a band entirely for the mallrat crowd, but they were also receiving a nearly-unrivaled amount of venom, both for their music and for the androgynous, flamboyant attire of lead singer Davey Havok and guitarist Jade Puget. In particular, I remember a lot of the ire being aimed at them as transphobic in nature; Havok was regularly referred to as a “he-she” by the eternally enlightened punk traditionalists.

AFI underwent another shift in public perception following 2009’s Crash Love. While their diehards were still ready and willing to go in any direction AFI was willing to take them, the record-buying public and the DIY kids both seemingly forgot about them entirely. They were now in “Oh, they’re still a band?” territory. For reasons I’ll get into later, that’s kind of a shame, because the band started pulling cues from post-punk and indie rock that manifested in unique ways, but for the purposes of this article, it’s pertinent to remind everyone that to most people, AFI are remembered for anywhere from two to four albums, but they’ve produced ten.

While AFI may not have been as successful as many other bands in this series at adapting themselves to the changing times, they’re worth taking a look at. In many ways, their life as a band is a microcosm of the scene we’re talking about: starting life as a scrappy skate-punk band, maturing into material that took more from hardcore and pop, and eventually transcending their roots and becoming something entirely different, yet still with those hardcore roots intact.

CULT STATUS

The thing about Northern California is that while places like Berkeley and San Francisco often get a lot of credit for being countercultural meccas, NorCal is still home to a metric ton of boring, borderline rural places. Ukiah, California is one of these; AFI often brightened up their roots by claiming to be an “East Bay Hardcore” band, and while that may technically be true, Ukiah is miserable. According to Wikipedia, two of their largest employers are Wal-Mart and Home Depot, which says a lot about your options there. The Bay Area is also known for a preponderance of methamphetamine addiction (even Billie Joe Armstrong was hooked on it for a while– see “Brain Stew” and “Geek Stink Breath”) and general drug usage, which is why Davey and Jade being vegan straight-edge is pretty unique for that area. All things considered, Ukiah is a pretty weird place for a band like AFI to have come from, almost as much as the Used coming from Orem. But don’t be fooled by the odd circumstances of their formation: early AFI is about as boilerplate as you can get.

I’m sure Answer That and Stay Fashionable and Very Proud of Ya have their adherents (many of whom were pissed at AFI for daring to actually write, you know, hooks and memorable parts in any of their songs later on), but even when I was younger and excited about this type of music, neither album made much of an impression. The one standout track is probably “I Wanna Get A Mohawk (But My Mom Won’t Let Me Get One)”, a pretty entertaining anthem for the type of suburban mall-punkers who were starting to get into the scene in the mid-90s thanks to the success of bands like NOFX and Lagwagon.

Ultimately though, from their first stirrings in 1991 up until about 1997, AFI were kind of boring. They hadn’t even settled on AFI standing for A Fire Inside, instead bandying about Asking For It, Anthems For Insubordinates, and Another Fucking Initial. And while Davey Havok and drummer Adam Carson were instituted in the band from the get-go, two of the most vital parts of their sound (guitarist and primary songwriter Jade Puget and bassist Hunter Burgan) were yet to join the fray. The result is a series of extremely monochromatic punk songs that have the snotty aesthetic of a band like Screeching Weasel or Guttermouth, but without any of the personality or catchiness. The songs are also mostly jokey affairs, rarely stopping to plumb the depths of despair in the way that the band would soon make their career out of.

That changed (somewhat) with the release of Shut Your Mouth and Open Your Eyes in 1997, the first AFI album to feature Hunter Burgan on bass– I don’t know what it is about the Bay Area, but it has a consummate knack for producing agile bassists who are uniquely adept at constructing extremely catchy and engaging bass lines (see also: Klaus Flouride, Matt Freeman, and Mike Dirnt). While Jade was yet to be a full-fledged member of the band, he contributed vocals and guitar work to several songs on the album. It was also the first album to feature one of AFI’s standing traditions– the short intro track. While it wasn’t the absolute peak of their powers, it was the first AFI record that felt like a record rather than a collection of songs. In addition, the riffs were getting both more melodic and harder-edged (they were finally discovering the “hardcore” part of “hardcore punk”) and Davey was finding his voice as a frontman, evolving from a nasal yelp into a sharper timbre with lots of range (check his screams in “Three Seconds Notice,” “Today’s Lesson,” and “Let It Be Broke,” for example).

More than that, the songs were becoming much more memorable, resulting in actual, anthemic songs rather than minute-and-a-half bursts of adolescent noise (those are still there, too, though). Songs like “Third Season” and “Salt for Your Wounds” are fully formed, engaging, and dare I say, catchy, bolstered by the inclusion of gang vocals. While they’d always been a part of AFI’s sound, it’s here that they began to take on their status as a fifth member of the band, adding weight and melody to already strong songs and fostering an extremely communal and energetic atmosphere.

Shut Your Mouth is often unfairly lumped in with the formless mess of the first two AFI records, but there is a lot to like here, especially if you’ve already whetted your appetite with their later material and want something with a touch more hardcore-esque aggression. The twisty-turns at the beginning of “Three Seconds Notice,” the two-step dance part at the end of “The New Patron Saints and Angels,” the haunting and eerie guitar work during the verses of “Third Season,” and the generally moody bridges that pervade throughout many songs on the record throughout makes Shut Your Mouth stand out among the glut of bro-stomp moshcore and youth crew revival that made up the majority of late-90s hardcore. Plus, Davey was developing a dark and twisted charisma all his own; drawing from the machismo of Glenn Danzig, the sensitivity of Robert Smith and Morrissey, and the throaty screams of Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye, he was a Molotov cocktail of a frontman. Known for his devilock, his unorthodox stage presence (he would often stand on the audience’s heads while singing) and wholesale commitment to the material, he made AFI stand out in a live setting when they could have easily sunk into a morass of personality-less punk.

Still, there was something missing from Shut Your Mouth and Open Your Eyes, not from all the songs, but from enough of them that the album felt like it could be improved upon. When Jade Puget joined the band as a full-time member in 1998 (coinciding with the exit of previous lead guitarist Mark Stopholes), things truly came together. I can’t stress enough how much Jade’s guitar sound is AFI. Drawing from hardcore more than straight-up punk, he was also heavily influenced by goth favorites like Siouxsie and the Banshees and Sisters of Mercy, which came through both in the theatricality of his riffs as well as the out-and-out poppiness of much of his material. This blend helped give AFI a huge sound and personality, and the difference is immediately noticeable on their first release with their newly solidified lineup, 1998’s A Fire Inside EP.

The two original tracks, “3 1/2” and “Over Exposure,” are an immediate step up from Shut Your Mouth, both in songwriting and production. Davey is beginning to an experiment with a mildly sassy spoken word delivery, while Jade’s guitar sound is just harder-hitting than anything the band had ever done before. The rhythm section matches the intensity perfectly– the breakdown in “Over Exposure” sounds absolutely massive. Genre-wise, the band is still playing speedy hardcore, but there’s an intangible new sense of darkness and desperation that plays out in fascinating ways.

The band also flexes new muscles on the B-side of the EP, which features a slightly rocked-out rendition of the Cure’s “Hanging Garden” and a fairly faithful version of the Misfits’ “Demonomania.” These covers make perfect sense– when you synthesize the Misfits and the Cure and update it with a snarling 90s sensibility, you get AFI.

A Fire Inside was released on Adeline Records, the vanity label that was started by Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong in order to help out more underground punk bands, but AFI was soon snatched up by the vanity label of a different big-league punk rocker– Nitro, which was run by Dexter Holland of the Offspring, who had recently signed to a major label and was experiencing massive success off the corny sugar-rush of Americana. With the backing of Holland, AFI doubled down on their songwriting efforts and began to experience their true creative peak.

CLOVE SMOKE CATHARSIS

Nobody really saw Black Sails In the Sunset coming. While it was plain to see that AFI were heading in a more serious direction with their last two releases, neither were necessarily cohesive. Black Sails is meant to be listened to as an album; from front to back, it doesn’t let up (aside from the ten-minute silence between ostensible closer “God Called In Sick Today” and hidden track “Midnight Sun”). No longer were AFI simply moody, they were downright miserable. No matter how exuberant the music itself sounded (and, trust, there are double-time skank beats for days on Black Sails), the guitar tone was dark, and Davey’s lyrics and delivery were darker. Add to that his newfound range– while he still remained in the upper-register shout of Shut Your Mouth and A Fire Inside, he also introduced a low-key, sensitive singing voice– and even more macabre lyrics, Black Sails is the apotheosis of every hardcore kid’s obsession with the Smiths, a darkly addictive and unrelenting album that successfully fused hardcore with goth and pop in a way that had never been done before, not even by similarly tortured bands like Christian Death.

From the militaristic chanting intro of “Strength Through Wounding,” it’s clear that AFI aren’t fucking around, and “Porphyria” follows through on that promise, moving from a breakneck intro to a swaggering, stomping breakdown bridge and back again, before segueing easily into the foreboding bass intro to “Exsanguination.” Black Sails has a forceful momentum that takes me by surprise whenever I listen; every time I think I’ve outgrown them, I find myself wanting to shout along with the ever-present gang vocals. Jade is extremely talented at breaking every song down into a theatrical and expressive bridge that sums up the track’s emotion; Davey matches it with his vocal performance, while Hunter and Adam make up the difference with a near-relentless bubbly and energetic assault in the rhythm section.

Every track on Black Sails feels like a standout. From the cataclysmic opening guitars of “Malleus Maleficarum” (yes, AFI have the edgy song titles on lock) to the sweeping and epic chorus, it feels like AFI have scientifically engineered every song on the album to evoke an unreal live reaction. The way that Davey moves his voice from calm-yet-tense to barely-controlled chaos in the bridge is matched only intensity by the climactic “whoas” of the song.

“Narrative of Soul Against Soul” is another breakneck track with a weirdly calm chorus (given a typically over-the-top energy from Davey’s lowly-mixed howls), being just short enough to not overstay its welcome and succumb to typical filler track status. This is important, because it’s followed by the album’s centerpiece and one of my personal favorite songs on the record, “Clove Smoke Catharsis.” Beginning with a bombastic intro, the song slows down and stretches out to a relatively mammoth-sized four-and-a-half minute runtime. Arguably the “ballad” of the album, it’s truly a black lipstick-smeared, goth-inflected epic replete with both Davey’s gentlest singing and most agonized yelling on the album, along with the most intense instrumental performance yet. It naturalistically ebbs and flows with such an extremely tight grasp on dynamics that you barely blink as it transitions into “The Prayer Position” (another of my absolute favorite AFI songs), a mid-tempo, stomping hardcore track that openly condemns religion with such venom and sarcasm that it arguably contributed to my atheism at a young age. The song breaks down into a gentle and almost emo-inflected bridge before it explodes with the most head-nodding iteration of the main riff yet, with some tasteful, tribalistic drum rolls providing a thick gravity to the song’s already-heavy themes.

The album continues unabated by the two slower tracks, “No Poetic Device” being perhaps the fastest song on the record. Even when the song hits its requisite more restrained bridge, the rhythm section refuses to match Davey’s gentler cooing, opting instead for one of the bounciest bass lines ever recorded and extremely fast drumming, which provide some really neat dissonance, especially when the soft singing is occasionally broken up by staccato bursts of power chords and gang vocals.

“The Last Kiss” is, in my opinion, the peak of the album, marrying the speed and fury of hardcore with the sweetness and catchiness of pure pop– the juxtaposition between the pre-chorus and the chorus is immediate and affecting, heightening the skyscraper emotional stakes of the song, and further going over the top with an digitally-modified guitar break that gives way to a short-but-sweet, extremely emotive bridge and then bringing us home with a characteristically busy bass line and a succinct exit.

That same frenetic energy on the bass announces “The Weathered Tome” with style and energy, while the two-step-friendly chorus provides the impetus for dancing and singing along galore. At this point, the songwriting may be becoming repetitive, but the fever-pitch intensity of the performances and the record’s short length means that the record never truly flags. Songs slow down, the bass takes center stage, the song hits an explosive conclusion– on the surface, it sounds easy, but I guarantee that it’s extremely difficult to make the formula come up aces on every track as AFI does here.

The penultimate track, “At A Glance,” is a close runner-up contender for my favorite song on the record. Beginning with a typically breathless and catchy skate-goth verse, this song’s bridge is genuinely sinister and moving, and right when it reaches its logical endpoint, it instead stretches out into a half-time masterpiece. Much has been made of AFI’s over-reliance on “whoa”s during this time period (see NOFX’s “Whoa On the Whoas”) but when they are utilized as well as they are here, I don’t see a need to complain. Of course, the contrast between the heavy-yet-bouncy bass line and the highly-pitched octave chords Jade wrings out of his guitar as the song reaches its end help a lot, too. AFI makes misery sound positively ecstatic.

“God Called In Sick Today,” while not my choice for the album’s best song, is a justifiable fan favorite. Davey genuinely sings here, in an unguarded and vulnerable fashion, giving fans their first glimpse at the band’s true pop aspirations. There’s still shouting and “whoa”s to go around, for sure, but the aggression is easily tempered by the melancholy that hangs heavy over the entire affair. “God Called In Sick Today” isn’t even the longest song on the record, but it sounds massive, and it makes sense that it was the requisite Black Sails setlist staple as late as the Decemberunderground era.

While “God Called In Sick Today” is definitely an admirable closer, AFI threw in the hidden track “Midnight Sun” ten minutes after it ended, and it’s a damn great hidden track, skating along with reckless energy and even including a nearly-overbearing but perfectly-pitched acoustic bridge, complete with almost-buried, eerie whispering, that capably puts a cap on arguably the most tortured and consistent AFI album.

Black Sails In the Sunset is magnificent, and arguably AFI’s greatest album (it’s definitely here that many of the band’s earliest fans jumped off and many of the band’s later fans jumped on). It’s an album of both tireless energy and deep darkness, but the combination of the two makes for an exquisite listening experience, one that makes you understand why so many kids with chain wallets and checkered Vans graduated to Doc Martens and chokers. With Black Sails In the Sunset, AFI crafted their first (but, perhaps contentiously, not their only) masterpiece.

However, Davey and Jade are unstoppable songwriting machines, and Black Sails In the Sunset was just the latest in a seemingly-endless stream of hits for the band from 1999 to 2000. While their next full-length record, The Art of Drowning, is held in nearly as high esteem as Black Sails In the Sunset (and some would say it’s better), I think that the outright best AFI record lies in between the two, with the All Hallow’s EP, released in October of 1999.

All Hallow’s includes another Misfits cover, this time of the thematically fitting “Halloween,” and I honestly think it is better than the original– Davey’s sharper singing voice and the fact that all the members of AFI are simply better musicians than the original iteration of the Misfits helps that massively. This EP also features “The Boy Who Destroyed the World,” which was featured on Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 and was many people’s first exposure to the band. It wasn’t mine, but this EP does feature the first song I ever heard by AFI, and my favorite of theirs to this day, “Totalimmortal.”

All Hallow’s is four songs of breathless melodic hardcore, far surpassing the “horror punk” label that it often gets tagged with– from the creepy, lilting guitar intro of “Fall Children” through to the downright destructive bridge of “Totalimmortal,” every song on this EP feels like AFI showing off all their muscles. There’s tantalizing fast drum beats, intriguing bass lines, and some of Davey’s most impassioned singing yet. A few of the songs feature ambient noise (their “Halloween” cover is supplanted by a full two minutes of piano chaos) but it adds to the mood rather than subtracting from it. This is the era of AFI that really introduced them (and their fans) to the whole Nightmare Before Christmas/Hot Topic aesthetic, which would eventually become their downfall, but here it feels vital and likable rather than cheesy.

A few of my favorite moments on this record: the chorus of “Fall Children,” which hits as viscerally and physically as a brick to the face; the bridge of “The Boy Who Destroyed the World,” which features some of Jade’s most intriguing and intricate guitar work within a hardcore setting; and the entirety of “Totalimmortal,” from the absolutely incredible bass work and Davey’s untouchably good vocals in the bridge to the way that the “whoa”s extend themselves slightly past their breaking point during the final chorus to Jade’s quiet supporting vocals in the pre-chorus.

While I love Black Sails and Drowning as much as the next person, I often tell people to start with All Hallow’s, because it’s short, accessible, and tells you everything you need to know about this era of the band. It’s dark, it’s fun, and it’s amazingly catchy. There aren’t too many tangible differences between Black Sails AFI and Drowning AFI, but I do think that Drowning is slightly more traditionally catchy and poppy, and All Hallow’s splits the difference between that and their earlier melancholic aggression rather nicely. If you’ve somehow never listened to AFI until this point in your life (or even if you’ve been a longtime fan but haven’t gone back to this one in a while), take a listen. The weather is right for it.

SACRIFICE THEORY

There really was only so far that AFI could push their whole EC Comics-inspired image at this time, and The Art of Drowning (named after a book of poetry by Billy Collins) is kind of the peak of it. The hints of occult that peeked through in song titles like “Malleus Maleficarum” are now a full-blown overtone, and the art direction is self-consciously cartoony; that was fine for a one-off like the All Hallow’s EP, but for an LP, it makes Drowning feel kind of locked in time and space. Drowning is AFI leaning into the image that they’d cultivated with their previous two releases, and while it’s still extremely good, you can’t help but hear them beginning to grow tired with their self-imposed limitations.

The album starts off with the mildly disappointing intro “Initiation,” which wastes a foreboding and suitably creepy palm-muted guitar line early on for a “Reoccurring Dreams”-style burst of chaos, but it’s soon back to business as usual with the off-kilter bass intro and gang vocal theatrics of “The Lost Souls.” The Art of Drowning is an interesting album, in that it’s full of songs that follow the Black Sails formula (“The Lost Souls” features that traditional slow-down bridge with an evocative and sad guitar interstitial before bursting back into the initial energy) but it also features moments where AFI are clearly straining against their confines. “The Nephilim” is an effectively classical AFI tune, but the repeating intro riff and a brief, sparse moment right before the final chorus shows that AFI were trying to play with the post-punk-isms that would define their later material.

“Ever and A Day” is perhaps the first time that AFI wrote a truly anthemic pop-rock riff, the kind that would carry them to success later on, with more of Davey’s constrained singing during the verses. Of course, they were still on Nitro, so it still has a heavy edge to it that maintains the appeal they’ve cultivated throughout the mid-era of their career, but the fact that this songs never really rises above mid-tempo shows that AFI were becoming more concerned with accessibility.

Luckily, “Sacrifice Theory” changes things up, moving at a neck-snapping pace and showing Hunter Burgan at the absolute peak of his powers with an extremely nimble and catchy bass line throughout. Even when the song pauses for its traditional slowdown, my attention is consistently drawn to his extremely charismatic efforts on bass, although the final chorus introduces a tasteful melodic overtone from Jade.

The bass theatrics continue during “Of Greetings and Goodbyes,” a likably stomping number with perhaps the most infectious chorus on the record. The Art of Drowning is the sound of an underground punk band bristling against the confines of the underground touring circuit, and “Of Greetings and Goodbyes” would have been an enormous hit single in another world, Jade’s high-pitched guitar tone giving the whole song a bit of an unhinged atmosphere.

The digital manipulation on the guitar at the beginning of “Smile” is an endearing fakeout, as the song immediately becomes a throwback to the more straightforward hardcore of the Shut Your Mouth days, albeit with much more engaging bass work and a likably off-kilter and brief guitar freakout during the bridge and outro.

The following two tracks, “A Story At Three” and “The Days of the Phoenix,” are really where it shows that AFI were struggling with their own genre. The beginning of “A Story At Three” feigns a gothic dirge in the vein of “Clove Smoke Catharsis,” but it quickly becomes a standard AFI track. However, the song does follow through on the promise of the intro with the end of the track, a long and agonized meditation on the song’s central melody that feels downright elegaic, so that when the bring-it-home fast chorus comes back, it sounds renewed. Meanwhile, “The Days of the Phoenix” was maybe the first AFI track to gain a significant amount of radio airplay, bolstered by an extremely catchy guitar riff and a monstrous, affecting chorus. “I fell into yesterday” is such an evocative line and the song matches that yearning sensibility perfectly, toning down the speed and aggression just enough that it sounds fun and jaunty without sacrificing what made AFI such a unique force within hardcore. Again, there is a bridge that evokes Midwest emo, with another spoken word endeavor from Davey. “The Days of the Phoenix” is deservedly one of the first songs that people think of when The Art of Drowning comes up, and it shows that this record was much more of a bridge between the gothcore of Black Sails and the breakthrough pop success of Sing the Sorrow than people give it credit for.

Enjoyably, AFI immediately reneges on the promise of “The Days of the Phoenix” with “Catch A Hot One,” a song that combines the frenzied energy of Earth AD-era Misfits with a skittering and accomplished bassline and a frenetically catchy gang-vocal refrain (“Have you ever turned to dust?”). The Art of Drowning might not be AFI’s most artistically accomplished record, but it’s a very good record, and when “Catch A Hot One” segues into a savage breakdown (along with more freaky guitar work from Jade), it’s easy to see why this one has so many diehard adherents.

Hunter Burgan really is the unsung hero of this record, as so many songs here live and die by the nuance he provides with his memorable and stunningly competent bass lines, like “Wester.” This song is what The Art of Drowning could have been, a further refinement on the Black Sails formula, filled with emotion and tension and a characteristically stellar drum performance during the bridge, as well as a ground-punching two-step part.

“6 to 8” is another moment where Drowning shows that AFI were capable of so much more, a truly brooding and unnerving number with intricate guitar work and perhaps Davey’s most restrained and subtle vocal performance yet, but still brimming with the kind of energy that invokes circle pits and pile-ups. This song signifies the homestretch of the record, and it’s the perfect, almost-but-not-quite-calm moment for this segment of the record. Hardcore this song ain’t, but it’s still informed enough by hardcore to feel vital, complete with a mournful-yet-exhilarating guitar solo that caps off the whole endeavor.

“The Despair Factor” is both the first song where AFI really plays with their electronic and industrial influences (in the dark and cold intro) as well as the song that gave their fanbase, the Despair Faction, their name. It’s one of the most definitive AFI songs, in that it’s chock full of speed and melody in equal parts, as well as more of Davey’s spoken word melodrama (including a fun Beetlejuice quote that sees Davey doing his best Winona Ryder impression). Calling AFI post-hardcore at this juncture of their career doesn’t feel quite right, but it almost fits in the way that AFI are trying to push past those boundaries, especially with the absolutely cacophonous bridge, with both some of the gentlest and hardest-edged guitar work in the band’s history.

The closer, “Morningstar,” is the apotheosis of AFI’s aspirations on this album, an actual pop song full of singing, strings, and a very understated and lengthy intro. I’ve seen this song called the sequel to “God Called In Sick Today,” but it’s more sprawling, more indicative of things yet to come for the band, and much more of a prologue to “The Leaving Song.” The way that it builds up to its tension-filled “I don’t want to die tonight” refrain is a master-class in dynamics, especially when it finally explodes in the way that we’ve been wanting it to the entire time. “Morningstar” is the true send-off to this era of AFI, even with another hidden track (the short, Misfits-y banger “Battled”) functioning as the actual ending of the album.

After The Art of Drowning, the band pressed pause for three years, focusing more on touring, before riding all the momentum they’d built into a contract with DreamWorks. It’s here that AFI begins for a lot of people, as well as where AFI ends for a lot of others. For the purposes of this series, here is where AFI truly earned their title as a “Band You Weren’t Supposed to Like.” They were given the sellout tag instantaneously by people who had been aware of them previously, and many who had just discovered them instantly dismissed them because of their new image, centered around the makeup-strewn posturing of Davey and Jade. Were they correct to do this? Obviously not– that’s a horribly gender-normative view of the world, and it’s impossible to defend in good conscience. However, it must be said that Sing the Sorrow is not actually a very good record, and it’s hard to defend it in good conscience.

THE GREAT DISAPPOINTMENT

I have to admit, at this point in writing the article, I stopped and said to myself, “What the fuck, I’m only halfway through AFI’s discography? What absolute bullshit.” That’s kind of indicative of how I feel about this period of the band musically as well: aside from a few sonic highlights, it’s just a chore to get through. Sing the Sorrow is nearly an hour long, but it somehow manages to feel even longer. It boggles my mind that this is the record that launched them into the mainstream– sure, some of the songs are catchy (“Girl’s Not Grey” is one of the most sticky and consistent songs ever written, to be sure), but the whole effort is bogged down by songs that stretch long past their expiration dates and overwrought, muddy production. This album was produced by Butch Vig and Jerry Finn– the latter is the person who made blink-182’s major-label albums sound so vibrant and immediate, while the former is the person who sanded Nirvana’s Nevermind down into glistening sameness. The result is an album that sounds both too fussed-over and only half-formed, a would-be epic that doesn’t follow through on its promise, and I found myself experiencing an odd sort of combination of boredom and annoyance every time I forced myself to listen to this record for this article.

A large part of the reason for my frustration with Sing the Sorrow is that about half the record shows extreme promise, especially in the first half– despite the snoozer of an intro this time around, the guitar work in “The Leaving Song, Part II” is refreshingly innovative, “Bleed Black” is suitably propulsive and features an enjoyable acoustic bridge, “Silver and Cold” is about as fun as a sad-ass ballad can be– but it feels a lot more reserved than it ought to. The would-be hardcore track, “Dancing Through Sunday,” is where the cracks start to show for me, and I find myself thinking, “This should sound a lot harder, right?” It’s functional and not bad (the guitar solo is a pretty welcome accoutrement given the mid-tempo, accent-less slack of much of the record), but there’s something missing.

Davey certainly hasn’t gotten any worse as a vocalist, and has thrown a few more tricks into his grab bag– his high, smooth croon is now augmented by an evincing baritone, and his screams are beginning to attain a more tangy and gritty metalcore tone to them– but in the process of pushing their songs into a big-league mentality, AFI feels like they’ve forgotten what made them part of the big leagues in the first place. This is rectified somewhat by the genuine heaviness of “Death of Seasons”– simultaneously harsher and catchier than any hardcore song they’d written previously, with a gripping industrial-derived second verse– but much of this album is composed of interchangeable riffs and hooks, a bunch of gears turning with little purpose.

I mean, I’m probably one of the only ones who feels this way, as this album launched AFI into the mainstream eye without much convincing, and this album was bafflingly highly acclaimed. This album doesn’t sustain itself much for me on repeated listens– there’s a series of boring, go-nowhere songs in the middle section like “The Great Disappointment,” “Paper Airplanes (Makeshift Wings),” and “This Celluloid Dream”– and although I don’t wish that they made a big-budget version of Black Sails or Drowning, that probably would have been preferable to the glossy and confused mess that is Sing the Sorrow.

The stripped-down aesthetic of “The Leaving Song” and the genuinely moving sing-along moments and savage breakdown of “…but home is nowhere” almost salvage this album, as they are probably the most emotionally convincing moments here, but AFI misses their hat-trick with the ten-minute drudge “This Time Imperfect,” a song that’s so in love with its own atmospherics that it forgets to actually flesh out the perfectly good song that’s buried in there.

With Sing the Sorrow, I get the sense that AFI wanted to upgrade from “theatrical” to “cinematic,” but in the process, I think they lost a lot of the visceral energy and verisimilitude of their last two LPs, which both sounded like they’d evoke the same response live as they did on record. Sorrow, by contrast, feels like a studio album, and while AFI would go on to do interesting things within those confines, here it feels hollow and tapped out. The black lights are on, but nobody’s home.

THE MISSING FRAME

For a band that was so prolific– releasing two EPs and five LPs within a five year period– once AFI signed to a major label, they seemed to spend a lot of time regrouping. Granted, after Sing the Sorrow was released to an warm commercial response, some regrouping was probably necessary. You tour for your new fans, and you write songs that build on what you’ve already accomplished. For a lot of bands, ignoring what your old fans want is a death knell, but after Sing the Sorrow AFI continued to make moves that alienated people who wanted more of the same from them, and it actually worked really well, for two reasons.

ONE: Many bands who fail because they alienated their old fans failed because they didn’t have the persona or likability to form a diehard cult around themselves. AFI are not one of these bands. The Despair Faction may not boast the numbers that it once did, but the people in it would die for Hunter, Adam, Davey, and Jade, and that’s a fact.

TWO: In the three-year interim between Sing the Sorrow and AFI’s biggest commercial success to date, 2006’s Decemberunderground, something strange happened: My Chemical Romance got big, and were followed by a multitude of bands who bit their goth aesthetic but didn’t have any of the soul (see: Aiden). AFI were borrowing tips from the goth playbook before My Chemical Romance had even formed, so they probably realized it was a good time to double down on it, and they started pulling more blatantly from goth musically as well, with sophisticated and layered pop songwriting and more generous incorporation of dance music and synthesizers. The result was a much more cohesive and consistent album than Sing the Sorrow, and a real fucking firestorm of a main single.

“Miss Murder” really was AFI’s brightest moment as a mainstream outfit, as well as the thing that ultimately buried them. That groovy bass riff and the almost football-chant quality of the chorus were custom-built for mainstream success, and it rocketed AFI past even the heights of “Girl’s Not Grey”– “Miss Murder” has the odd distinction of being the song that the coaches at my school made kids listen to while doing exercises in the gym, joining quintessential Jock Jams like Limp Bizkit’s “Rollin'” and “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)” by C+C Music Factory.

Simultaneously, it was with “Miss Murder” and Decemberunderground as a whole that I feel AFI was codified as The Hot Topic Band, which ruined their credibility for holier-than-thou “true punk/hardcore/emo/whatever” types forever, and immediately put an expiration date on them. Kids who wore Hot Topic in middle school were made fun of (sometimes rightly so– all that Invader ZIM merch really was rather gaudy, wasn’t it?), which sent a message to all the kids who loved AFI and their brethren back then: expressing masculinity or femininity in ways considered outside of the norm was to be punished, and blending the two, in the way that Davey and Jade did so skillfully (I hate the term “guyliner,” but a lot of bands of the day were pretty fucking lazy at applying makeup, while Davey and Jade always looked damn gorgeous), meant that you were a “tranny,” a “shemale,” or any other number of horrible transphobic slurs. Whether the kids were trans or not, it was still harmful; I think that’s actually a really big reason why so many kids grew out of their so-called “scene phase,” and by extension, bands like AFI. “Miss Murder” introduced them to the soccer mom mainstream, but simultaneously condemned them to a career of playing mostly to lifers, becoming ever less likely to recruit new fans into their brood.

Decemberunderground is, by the way, a pretty fucking good album, and it’s totally understandable that it’s AFI’s biggest hit. The dance-synth/handclap chemical mixture of opener “Prelude 12/21” is immediately infectious, the aforementioned “Miss Murder” genuinely slays, especially once its shockingly heavy bridge kicks in, and the freezing and airy melodies of “Love Like Winter” make it an able contender for follow-up single. There’s some really cool nods to the hardcore AFI of the past in songs like “Kill Caustic” and “Affliction,” while other songs like “Summer Shudder” truly do show a world in which AFI became an ever-relevant pop-rock band. Unfortunately, their attempt to solidify themselves as such, Crash Love, was kind of a colossal failure.

It’s not that Crash Love is necessarily bad, because there are some real standout tracks on it (the huge chorus and shimmery guitar solo on “Medicate,” for example), but AFI spent way too long writing it and it shows. They were smart enough to know that mainstream emo’s time in the spotlight wouldn’t last forever, and so they crafted some alterna-rock gems like “Veronica Sawyer Smokes” and “Darling, I Want to Destroy You,” but too often fall back on lazy choruses– closer “It Was Mine” is a particularly bad offender, which makes my eyes roll every time I listen.

To that end, it’s understandable that AFI somewhat retreated. Aside from their foray into full-on post-punk with the mostly forgettable Burials, Davey and Jade occupied themselves with side projects like the moody electronic music of Blaqk Audio (not my thing) and the thunderously heavy vegan straight-edge digital hardcore of XTRMST (totally my thing, and you should definitely listen to it– it’s got the hardest and most inventive guitar riffs that Jade ever wrote, and some of Davey’s most bilious lyrics and delivery, especially on “Social Deathplay” and the stellar “Swallow Your God”). By the time of their most recent full-length effort, 2017’s The Blood Album, I kind of expected them to make a commercial comeback, but it didn’t quite happen for them

That’s a shame, because The Blood Album is their best album since Decemberunderground, and an able fusion of all the various places they’d taken their music throughout the years, from the hard-edged pop-punk of “Snow Cats” and “White Offerings” to the hardcore-inflected religion-bashing of “Above the Bridge” and the aggressive-but-restrained post-punk of “Pink Eyes.” Ultimately, though, AFI is still in the same place that they were. Last year, they released the middling and tired effort The Missing Man EP and have been mostly quiet since then. It’s a little sad to see, because over the course of ten albums, AFI have shown that it’s possible to expand from hardcore into experimental and worthwhile horizons– it’s just a shame that they themselves only followed through on that promise three or four times.

THE DEVIL LOVES YOU

So ultimately, what is AFI’s legacy? They got a shitload of kids into hardcore– Davey often reps the sweaters of bands like Refused when they play live– and introduced a lot of people to vegan straight-edge (while I am not straight-edge, I do think it’s a valid and important lifestyle for many people, and I am working to become vegan). They also inadvertently made their fashion sense and the aesthetics of much of their fanbase an undeserving punching bag throughout the mid-2000s, which is a damn shame, and I hope newer, “scene”-influenced bands like Wristmeetrazor and Kaonashi assist in bringing it back in a slightly more enlightened social climate.

Am I embarrassed to be a fan of AFI? No, but I am sad. For a band that reached the dark heights that they did during their pre-mainstream days, I feel like they deserved a lot more, if only they’d been able to parlay that momentum into even more consistently excellent songwriting. I know AFI has a strong and dedicated fanbase that will follow them to the ends of the earth, but I wish they hadn’t turned to dust for everyone else. But no matter what they do in the future, the records they made at the height of their powers will always ignite a fire inside me.

NEXT WEEK: The end days are upon us, my friends. Before I close out the series for good, though, I want to take a look at the artist that became the modern equivalent of the bands I’m talking about, the person who arguably became a martyr for the return of the scene, and one of my favorite artists of the last five years: Lil Peep. Stay tuned.