I saw AFI supporting the Offspring at the start of 2001 and thought they were fine. I didn't think about them again until the end of the year, when I saw what their albums looked like and got enamoured with their mix of cartoon gothic and faux-vintage artwork, maybe even liking the imagery more than the music like some kind of superficial teeny bopper, I can't say for sure.
Then they moved on and so did I, compartmentalising their surprisingly brief "gay Misfits" era as the specific AFI I nostalgically liked. Did they really get worse, or does it just depend on what year you happened to turn 16? Did they get better again? Were they ever any good in the first place?
Here are my The Top 15 AFI Albums and Worthwhile EPs (those with mostly exclusive tracks, not just re-recordings or repurposings). Listened to properly and reading along with the lyrics like an authentic teenager, no less in touch with the American high school context than I ever was.
Skeleton key:
Album
EP
An increasing roster of side projects giving Davey and Jade the chance to let off creative steam leaves AFI stuck in a retro rut. It doesn't sound like anyone's especially enthused to be here, and even the lyrics seem overly repetitive now. Though that could just be because I've spent all day listening to AFI.
Here's hoping their next release will be more distinctive and alienate their established fan base again. I'd rather be annoyed than bored.
After what felt like a reluctant album (in my mind; no doubt the band expressed renewed vigour and how they were prouder of it than anything in years, etc.), it's nice to get a throwback to the days when they'd release a few songs they'd worked on just for the hell of it, rather than saving them up for a more commercially viable LP.
It's just more of the same, but in a classic AFI trick, the friendly EP format makes each song feel more worthy of paying attention to.
As first impressions go, Davey's affected angry kid shouting has never warmed me to this album. Even the death-obsessed lyrics seem less gothic and more emo this time around, but there's likely some blind prejudice there.
Outside of the handful of songs completely ruined by bandwagon jumping, the album's not too bad and has its moments, but it's also the first that really drags. We've come a long way from frantic minute-long songs about breakfast cereals.
More consistent than the previous album, the downside of this being that it all blurs together and isn't very memorable. There's no connection to the band's early work any more, but it's been such a gradual transition that this is still indisputably, intangibly AFI, albeit slower, gentler and not very compelling.
Unfortunately, it's all a bit too girly even for my inner teenage goth girl, and I'm not just basing that on the cover. It doesn't help though.
I've tried to go through the discography a couple of times before, but this mediocre sophomore effort always derails it early on and makes me forget how good its predecessor was.
It's pretty much the same as the debut on the surface, even down to pointlessly repeating several songs, but the uncharacteristic lack of progress is disappointing in the grand scheme and the trade-off for more harmonic choruses is shoutier verses. No, I'm not looking forward to the emo era.
Four songs (if you plump for vinyl), none of them over two minutes in length and some not even one, this is faster than I remember the early albums being, but maybe that's because I'm decrepit now. Davey races through his actually-teenage tirades and vignettes without taking a breath, over a murky wall of instruments that hits the sweet spot between DIY punk credibility and unlistenable. Only 'NyQuil' would be recycled, making this a mandatory prologue.
Belatedly discovering this obscure EP tucked between my two favourite albums from the band has already made this a worthwhile exercise. Closer to 'Morningstar' than the next album, the punk spirit's still alive in these two upbeat elegies. We should get better acquainted, but I'll probably forget.
It's just a shame it's so short, even by EP standards, but now that the songs are longer, it works out kind of the same. Bunging in a couple of cover songs might've helped it to climb the ranks though.
Still in Era I, but the gothic darkness has crept in now – lyrically and aesthetically more than musically. This was the earliest one I had as a teenager, and it was only the few melodic songs that stood out amid the shouty whole – the ones that prefigured their "classic" sound, according to me. For those who prefer their punk more generic, I guess this was the end of the road.
An iconic horror punk EP, even if I found the artwork vexingly on the childish side as a super-mature teenager and the banana yellow typeface really didn't agree with me. Song titles about 'children' and 'boys' probably didn't help either.
Less notable than the packaging, there was some good music on it too! Four distinctive songs with replay value that justified the short release, some sadly spoiled by excessive ambient outros to pretend the disc was longer than it was.
These short, energetic songs don't waste any time, and were a refreshing change of pace for someone who mainly allows album-length soundscapes to consume his dwindling time these days.
Clean production lets the bass clunk satisfying along to the sing-along verses, but I didn't get as much from the poetry of adolescent and preschool angst or the arbitrary sampling. I noticed the guitar a couple of times.
5. A Fire Inside EP (1998)
I fetishised this EP after finding it in a local music shop and imagining I was the treasurer of something much rarer than it was. Unlike the other bridges in the discography, this doesn't give any suggestion of the more melodic direction the band was going in next, misdirecting with hostility and crunchy metal riffs to give an all too brief glimpse into what I used to think could have been the ultimate AFI expression, but is basically just Samhain.
The best songs they'd recorded so far (even if half of them aren't theirs), there was no need to dilute it with filler and call it an album.
The stand-out album from modern/"bad" AFI, they go full goth in the belated worthy successor to Sing the Sorrow, making the intervening decade's worth of bland material seem even more like a waste of time.
Despite the miserable themes, there's a renewed energy to the instruments and the choruses are still fun. Gothic rock's rarely as downbeat as it pretends to be.
The hardcore punk softens up but doesn't sail away on this transitional album, where Davey's lyrics achieve poetry, he braves some ballads and we place the final jigsaw pieces of Jade Puget's melodic guitar and Alan Forbes' ooky art that would define this brief but thankfully prolific era.
A classic of '90s punk as far as I'm concerned. Doubtless those who take the genre and the lifestyle more seriously would beg to differ.
I thought first place was a given, but in a rare turn up, the slow burn of evolving taste triumphed over nostalgia. And that's some powerful nostalgia, having got this for Christmas 2001 (surely the last time I participated in that twee ritual) and playing it non-stop all day, finding its effeminate melodies and eloquent poetry a fresh of breath air after a year mainly dominated by hostile nu metal. I even meticulously copied out the album art, my equivalent of singing into a hairbrush. The fact that the songs are all great and flow together well is a nice bonus.
Implicitly growing out of punk rock inevitably pissed off some old-school fans, but like Metallica's Black Album, AFI's commercial breakthrough is so undeniably high quality that it gets to straddle the bipartisan line.
I never had anything against the change of direction, I was just preoccupied with heavy metal by then, so only gave it a cursory dismissal before belatedly embracing it years later after migrating to the gothic camp. I've played it various times, but listening attentively this time, my inner teenage goth girl decided it was their finest work.
