Music Review: AFI album profoundly haunting

Published: Tuesday, April 8, 2003

Davey Havok is the punk rock equivalent of Edgar Allen Poe.

California’s AFI, or A Fire Inside if, to quote the Dude, “you’re not into the whole brevity thing,” has been kinetically summoning Halloween-spirited black mojo for over a decade.

The band’s newest masterpiece, Sing the Sorrow, renews the dooming prescription developed by their previous albums The Art of Drowning and Black Sails in the Sunset.

Often revered as revivalists, with five full-length albums and two EPs to their credit, the members of AFI gloriously carry on the traditional gothic-punk torch, upholding the hooting owl/cemetery/zombies inspired legacy of Ed Wood, Vincent Price and Glen Danzig of The Misfits.

But singer Davey Havok and the other three members of AFI outclass Danzig’s Misfits. By singing about more than the lust for undead girlfriends and Martians, it’s obvious that the semantic séance pool from which AFI conjures ideas runs deeper than the proverbial six feet.

AFI doesn’t disappoint those fastidious punk rockers searching for profundity in poesy. Latin Necronomicon-esque song titles, techno-gothic drum machines, industrial intonations and chainsaw-ripping guitar riffs help pull the listener into AFI’s doomed cavern, a land of dripping stalactites and vampire mystique.

Something remains elusive about AFI. The band’s lyrics are esoteric, not like the political crossword puzzles of Bad Religion, but more haunting and mysterious. The lyrics read like a dark, candle-lit biblical passage with a pinch of film noir detective gloom.

But AFI is more than the punk rock equivalent to “Night of the Living Dead.” The group’s opportune timing and understanding of traditional musical techniques gives Sing the Sorrow a classical, antique texture. The music is not dated, rather it has the mimetic quality of entering a musty attic after having just drunk several pots of black coffee — scared and energized.

Unlike the majority of punk rock, AFI understands the importance of a carefully crafted segue. Abrupt track closure and confrontational beginnings are not found on Sing the Sorrow. Interludes help the album be less viscous.
The album is a constant streaming flow of ups and downs without sudden drops and harsh ruptures.

Sing the Sorrow is an album of requiems, necromancy, hopelessness and what Havok calls in “Dance Through Sunday,” “horrid romance.”

Sing the Sorrow, produced by Butch Vig, is a standard AFI record and while it fails to reach the standard set forth by The Art of Drowning, its shortcomings are minimal and forgivable.

Enter the labyrinth.