AFI - AFI (The Blood Album)

Drowned In Sound 70

The tenth album from goth-rock stalwarts AFI, however, positively glistens beneath ultraviolet light. Though likely to be forever associated with Kerrang! pull-out posters and lumped into a myriad of maligned genres, AFI continue to endure. Their self-titled effort – also referred to as The Blood Album - reignites a band that has been around in one form or another for the past 26 years, even if it’s extremely careful not to reinvent their particular barbed wheel.

That in and of itself is a tricky contradiction to play with but when you’re ten albums in and the industry has shifted so much, survival of the fittest takes hold. As such, AFI is understandably concerned with commerciality as much as satisfying the disciples. For the most part, the scales are handsomely balanced. This is often a whip-smart record that wisely plays to AFI’s greatest strength – Davey Havok and his pop sensibilities.

With so many arrangements hitting their marks quickly – brevity proves a boon throughout – Havok throws out a barrage of hooks early doors. Booming opener ‘Dark Snow’ feels like a big budget sequel to Sing the Sorrow’s ‘Misera Cantare’ while there’s a certain jangly British spikiness to ‘Still a Stranger’ but it’s ‘Aurelia’ that really hammers home the benefits of keeping things short and straightforward. Lyrically it’s good old-fashioned hammy out-on-the-moors guff about wolves, chains, night vision and “barking in the wrong key” and it’s all the better for it as Havok goes full new romantic, sinking his teeth into an instantly infectious chorus that begs for repeat listens.

Tracks like ‘Hidden Knives’, ‘Get Hurt’ and ‘Above The Bridge’, meanwhile, all feel like they could have sat comfortably on the Burnout 3 soundtrack – that’s a compliment, that game ruled and its music played a pivotal role – though stacked together they run the risk of blurring into one another in AFI-by-numbers fashion. ‘Snow Cats’ is a much more successful venture as Havok addresses the cage of image, positing a subservient scenario which may well be universally applicable, arming the sentiment with a practically hypnotic chorus in which he imagines himself decked out in ice-cold finery.

This defiant confidence alongside the knowing navigation of genre tropes is especially admirable ten albums in but the truth is that the blood eventually starts to thin. Listener fatigue has become a genuine issue in the modern era and while that shouldn’t curtail an artist’s integrity, if your record is going to head beyond double figures, great efforts must be taken to justify the journey. AFI has little in the way of stumbles and no real clunkers to speak of, but a sense of familiarity and repetition creep in before the finish. It’s not enough to tarnish the gems but a greater commitment to ruthlessness would have been welcome. Still, this is a strong rebirth from an outfit that, perhaps appropriately, doesn’t quite know how to wither away.

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Stick around long enough, and once-popular bands will experience a critical reassessment completely independent of their new music. To wit, AFI: their 2003 major-label debut went platinum in 2006 on the strength of teens now old enough to give Sing the Sorrow its due props as some kind of alt-rock masterpiece, one that unified Fuse-punks, emo theater kids, mall-goths, and glam metalheads in a food court flashmob. Tilt your ears a certain way and you can hear Sing the Sorrow’s echoes in contemporaries like Touché Amoré, White Lung, and Deafheaven. During their surprising 2014 Coachella appearance, a sizable crowd witnessed a limber, vigorous performance of their hits that attested to frontman Davey Havok’s wholesome lifestyle choices. And while it’s been over a decade since they’ve appealed to anyone outside their core audience, the same could be said of peers like Jimmy Eat World, Deftones, and even Taking Back Sunday, who all made vital additions to their catalogs in 2016. With a self-titled record whose artwork is a blatant callback to Sing the Sorrow, the timing could not be better for AFI’s similarly triumphant comeback. Instead, they just sorta came back.

It’s a shame that The Blood Album missed the Vine era by three days, as it can be very seductive if you catch the right six-second frame: witness the call-and-response gang vocals that burst out of a very special goth episode of High School Musical, at least five choruses that scribble within the framework set by 2003’s “Girl’s Not Grey,” Havok’s “do try this in study hall” flights of poetry, the parts of Jade Puget’s solos that remind you that he has the name and the chops of a guy who’d have graced many a Guitar World cover in the ’90s.

Of course, those parts are going to be awesome. You know what else is awesome? Pretty much everything about the video for “The Leaving Song Pt. 2”—the whole Prom of the Living Dead dress code, the capoeira/circle pit choreography, every totally necessary behind-the-back guitar twirl, the close-ups on Havok’s lip ring. This is a clip that gets AFI. If The Blood Album is going to convince anyone who’s checked out since “Miss Murder,” it needs to likewise feel like expert stunt work or at least “The Crow goes crossfit”—we all know when the chorus is gonna come, but Havok needs to bring in the chorus with a roundhouse kick.

Still, at least half of The Blood Album’s songs feel virtually interchangeable and the other half sound like AFI wrote this stuff in the time it takes to play it. Even if all of the reflexively satisfying moments are consolidated into a highlight reel, that still leaves 40 minutes worth of custodial verses, downstroked basslines, and palm-muted chugging that never feel the need to justify their existence. When Havok’s words aren’t doused in purple highlighter, they’re exposed as basically meaningless, or, worse, like any Cure-inspired, vague song about introspection or sputtering relationships you can hear on any average indie rock record. “Am I coy enough? Am I boy enough?,” he whinges, and given that it slow dances to the same mannered waltz, “Snow Cats” could impart the blood oath devotion of “Silver and Cold” if delivered with any kind of flair or dynamics. Produced in-house with the assistance of KROQ-core vet Matt Hyde, nearly everything on The Blood Album plays at nearly the same exact drive-time volume and tempo.

Maybe that was the point. On every album since their commercial heyday, AFI have tried to challenge diehards: Crash Love was a brazen pop record, while 2013’s Burials diversified their wardrobe. The Blood Album presumably promises some kind of “back to basics” operating principle, but it’s a “basics” that doesn’t serve them, let alone recall the pulpier early phase on which they made their name. AFI shouldn’t be expected to resurrect the late, great Sing the Sorrow producer Jerry Finn, nor do they need to hire Marc Webb to blow a video budget that no longer exists for bands like them. The Blood Album just isn’t allowed to be boring.

If AFI wanted to reinvent themselves with streamlined and sober pop-rock, more power to them, but that’s not what The Blood Album does. There are still those moments that simultaneously speak to their strengths (“Hidden Knives”), but also bring up the question, why listen to AFI? This band doesn’t work in any specific musical genre so much as they do smeared-guyliner dramatics that never go out of style yet are in dire short supply right now, the developing of which is its own kind of craft. Without them, The Blood Album is virtually indistinguishable from any of the regrettably-fronted pop-metalcore bands playing in threes at a House of Blues near you. Perhaps it’s all worth it if The Blood Album spurs a rejuvenated interest in Sing the Sorrow and Black Sails on the Sunset, but the triumphant return of AFI is still ready when they are.