AFI review

I wrote this review of AFI's new album last month for NYU's paper, but it never ran. Thankfully, we have blogs just for this sort of thing!

AFI: "Crash Love" 3 1/2 stars out of 5

Breaking the emo mold is not an easy task, but AFI often come the closest to pulling it off. Their music is consistently tight, frontman Davey Havok can actually sing, and occasionally they break out a thumping lead single (“Miss Murder”) that threatens to break the genre wide open with heavy synths, roof-shaking hooks, doom-metal guitar riffs and legion-of-millions chants. Their new album “Crash Love” doesn’t really capitalize on the bold strokes of ‘06’s “Decemberunderground,” but it’s a solid record nonethless. The musicianship is still impressive, and Havok’s pipes are in fine form, but AFI seem to backpedal a bit, into a more generic form of punk, which is to say they don’t move forward thematically. The guys hem and haw just fine on tracks like the single “Medicate,” but the subject matter is all too familiar: my girlfriend dumped me, life sucks, yada yada yada. It’s a universal sentiment, so even emo naysayers will indentify with songs like “Darling, I Want to Destroy You” and “I Am Trying Very Hard to Be Here.” But for a band that flirted with broader topics like suicide and the afterlife its last time around, there should have been more here to love. If there’s anything that lifts AFI up here, it’s the glimpses of flair and style they allow themselves: the layered chorus of “Beautiful Thieves” adds a churchlike feel, and the poppy “Veronica Sawyer Smokes” has a radio-friendly quality thanks to its easy-on-the-ears background and a catchy hook. Those flashes show AFI aren’t in danger of going stale anytime soon, but they should still heed that classic broken-heart advice: move on, dudes.