Review Summary: AFI's latest transformation is inconsistently brilliant, offering scattered glimpses of how wonderfully this band could age should they ever piece together the loose ends of the puzzle.
Having grown up listening to AFI, it’s hard to believe that they’ve been around for thirty years. That perception isn’t merely because time flies, either. The band constantly shapeshifts, from the raucous punk of their debut
Answer That And Stay Fashionable to their dark, electronically-infused magnum opus
Sing the Sorrow, to more of a post-punk sound on recent efforts. The reason their career doesn’t
seem three decades old is because they continually find new ways to stay fresh. In hearing the lead single off of
Silver Bleeds The Black Sun, ‘Behind the Clock’ – combined with frontman Davey Havok’s thematic summation of the album being “a struggle to reconcile existence in a godless dystopia that lacks sanctuary, mystique, reason, and a chance of survival” – it seemed like another evolution was underway. With ‘Behind the Clock’’s heavy riffs, cavernous drums, and Havok’s haunting laments, it sounded like the band was primed to morph into a darkened, more stately apparatus that filters the shadowy, bleak elements of their
Black Sails through
Decemberunderground era with an aged-like-fine-wine, almost Bowie-esque
Black Star phase. Sounds amazing, right?
Glass-half-full,
Silver Bleeds The Black Sun does achieve that aesthetic in spurts. Opener ‘The Bird of Prey’ sees Havoc’s voice boom and echo above driving acoustic guitars; a deity-like figure hovering over the masses as he delivers verses straight out of a fever dream: “time unwinds the serpent / a drop of poison at a time.” ‘Holy Visions’ thrives atop a propulsive drum beat and infectious chord progression, painting vivid, nightmarish pictures like, “underground there is a man ever glowing, calling me home.” On the penultimate ‘A World Unmade’ – replete with faintly audible organs – a deep, weathered sounding Havok delivers spine-tinglers like, “the order is chaos / disorder is the form” and “I am the current’s break, a world unmade / imperceptible, infinite, I’m the heliocentric flaw.” It’s the sort of disturbed poetry that we’ve come to love from AFI, and when executed well,
Silver Bleeds The Black Sun sounds like a revelation.
Silver Bleeds The Black Sun’s struggle is in consistently nailing down that aesthetic. Often, the instrumental makeup of each song belies the gravity of its lyrics, subsequently dulling the impact. For example, ‘Ash Speck In A Green Eye’ and ‘Voidward, I Bend Back’ both share strangely upbeat (almost akin to Blaqk Audio at times) percussion that unfolds in a cadence far too similar to ‘Holy Visions’. This makes it difficult for all three songs to distinguish themselves from one another, while taking brilliantly crafted lyrics such as “I’m an ash that burns in beauty’s fire and I fall upon its fragile knife” and squandering them on what amounts to fairly generic dancefloor beats. Similarly, ‘Spear of Truth’ and ‘The Bird of Prey’ share congruent acoustic progressions that anyone would be hard-pressed to spot the differences between, even multiple listens in. For as dark and stately as AFI can sound at times throughout
Silver Bleeds The Black Sun, it's this overarching lack of variation in songwriting that ultimately holds the album back from achieving its highest goals.
On the bright side, Davey Havok steals the show here, delivering an immensely satisfying performance. He sounds older and slightly weathered, but somehow even more majestic. At some points in Havok’s delivery there are clear 80s influences – notably Echo & The Bunnymen. Elsewhere, such as the closing ‘NOONEUNDERGROUND’ (clearly a self-referential nod to
Decemberunderground), Havoc explodes out of the stagnant calm with a frantic
punktuation mark that distinctly recalls said era. A lot of
Silver Bleeds The Black Sun feels like a nostalgic blending of various 80s and 00s punk eras, and there might be no frontman on Earth better equipped to craft that atmosphere than Davey Havok. It's his voice that lends AFI’s twelfth album all of its soul.
AFI’s latest offering is a good one, but also one that seems to hint at a promise that it never quite fulfills. The
blackened, angry-at-the-world post-punk delivered through a theatrical, 80s-tinged lens aesthetic is absolutely perfect for them at this stage of their careers, and it’s a vision that the band should absolutely invest whatever resources they need into fully realizing. They occasionally hit the mark here, while also mixing in some throwbacks to decades passed, but
Silver Bleeds The Black Sun feels more like a rest stop en route to that destination. There are plenty of worthwhile moments for fans that make this entirely worth exploring, but ultimately this should end up being a catalyst for even better things to come from AFI.
