rip

Album Rating: 4.0

???

Album Rating: 4.5

really bad place for a page break lol

no one died i just missed them playing a song from this during the nba playoffs

Album Rating: 4.0

I was very concerned for a moment.

my bad

Love the interview. interesting album

Album Rating: 4.0

It’s absurd that black sails through STS have a 4 average and this and CL are very low 3s. Both deserve at minimum a 3.5.

Album Rating: 3.5

Never got into CL but i really liked this back in the day even though i feel this is the point they started to go downhill somewhat

Album Rating: 4.0

I think the sharp downhill began post CL, but I think DU is a common sentiment. Missing Man was great though.

Album Rating: 3.5

Yeah i have heard people say good things about Missing Man so maybe it is time i listen to it

Album Rating: 4.0

yeah, you can skip Blood for sure, Burials has some good tracks (17 Crimes, The Conductor, A Deep Slow Panic), but I would encourage listening to missing man, just 5 tracks.

Album Rating: 3.5

yeah Burials was the last album i listened to. Jammed the hell out of 17 Crimes and A Deep Slow Panic. Solid tunes for sure

miss murder still slaps

Album Rating: 4.5

miss murder is fun. miss murder's bridge is sick as fuck

Album Rating: 4.0

miss murder's bridge is sick as fuck [2]



One of my favorite guitar bridges to jam.

Album Rating: 3.5

Thinking back, The Interview was an introduction to the type of music I came to love later. I still love that song.

Album Rating: 4.5 | Sound Off

Decemberunderground is imo extremely underrated. Their biggest hit single Miss Murder gets too much hate because it did decent with crossover support. I don't think Havok's screams are noticeably weaker on the album. I don't think the album is a struggle to listen to. I am less likely to turn tracks off of DecemberUnderground than Sing The Sorrow or even The Art of Drowning (Black Sails in the Sunset or Sing the Sorrow is their best album imo) because I have listened to this album so many times.



It is an album that greatly benefits from repeated listens. Most pop-punk albums of the mid-2000s were worthy of a few spins, but you eventually only play the singles off the album. I could easily play 37 MM, Endlessly, She Said, The Interview, Kiss and Control, Affliction, Summer Shudder, and Kill Caustic multiple times.



I think Love Like Winter is the strongest single off of the album. The Missing Frame is the weakest song on the album imo because it drags compared to the other singles. It is supposed to be more U2/The Church influenced, but I think 5 minutes is too long for the single. The instrumentation is the most bland on this song. For the most part, this albums instrumentation is varied, I don't think every song sounds the same.



Those are some of my opinions on this album. I think AFI does a great job of changing their sound on this album. I beg to differ with the original assertion that this album is a pale watered down version of other similar sounding bands who successfully switched genres at the time (Deftones, Poison the Well, and Thrice), but this is way more in debt to bands like Depeche Mode, OMD, Inxs, Kate Bush, and The Smiths than those bands were at the time.

Album Rating: 4.0

Time has done interesting things to the userbase's take on this album. It has a 3.1 average, which is pretty low, and it suffered a huge backlash from previous fans. As well as being on Sput, I was a member of the afi official message board when this dropped, and it was pandemonium. The forum was flooded with threads of anger and disappointment. Core members of the forum quit. Heck, even my irl friends were like "they sold out, this sucks".



Blood also has a 3.1 average yet the active userbase here - at least those who comment on AFI threads - typically praises DU and dismisses Blood as a low point. I'm not sure what to make of all the above, honestly.



Certainly, as a much bigger fan of Blood than DU, it strikes me as weird that DU gets all the praise when it has an identical average!

Album Rating: 4.5 | Sound Off

To be honest with you, The Blood Album made me give up on listening to them anymore the same way anyone slightly older than me gave up on AFI when DU came out. I was 10 when it came out that Summer. It was AFI's moment on music television back when Fuse was the main channel to see pop punk bands or videos. I am old enough to remember when music television played music videos. If you wanted to watch 80s music videos, you'd turn to VH1 Classic.



I feel like a lot of people were turned off by the complete abandonment of their old sound, it doesn't sound like Sing the Sorrow, it attracted the mall goths, poseurs, and other undesirable scene labels that these die hard fanbases hate more so than their contemporaries did. It also sold better than their contemporaries because of Miss Murder having mild crossover success. It just had everything perfect for a staunch and militant fanbase to jump ship on the band because they apparently sold out.



DU deserves to be a 3.5 at least, I would ultimately love a 3.8, but it will never happen. The album will never be retrospectively evaluated in such a glowing and positive manner because of the mere attitude towards the album at the time of its release.