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Live Review
by SashaS
7-6-2003
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| AFI: fire in, out, cosmic, omnipresent |
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Live: AFI
Forum, London
Friday, June 6, 2003
AFI – Danger! Fire everywhere!
It doesn’t take too many songs that a curse – Destiny, the cruel bitch! – rings in me idea-box. Man, Evanescence have taken 6 weeks to sell 1 million copies of become the hottest new stars of the emo-cum-Linkin Park sub-genre (if I were Frank Truman) while AFI are on their sixth studio album, the brilliant ‘Sing The Sorrow’. There is no comparison – just the fate’s games no one understands.
Ten years of gigging, recording, philosophy building and abstaining have finally started to count and from the moment the band takes their positions, the place goes unhinged. This is a devoted crowd known as The Despair Faction, singing along, getting high on it, bonding and reacting with ‘them’, some sort of a ceremony is in progress. It is hard to believe it had to take an Offspring’s cover of the band’s ‘Totalimmortal’, included on the ‘My, Myself & Irene’, to kick their career out of cult-dom.
Davey Havok (né David Marchant) might look like a minimalist relative of Marilyn Manson but he can sing and does it in so many styles… Well, they have one thing in common with Amy Lee’s lot: AFI are hard as hell to classify. Sure, it is rock but there are so many other elements you don’t know where to start: heavy, industrial, punky, nu, symphonic, poppy, progtastic, cyber, energetic, tender… (Where is the ‘Adjectives phrase-book’?) Goth? Yeah, as much as Led Zepp were! (Yank-hacks should refrain from using terms they don’t comprehend, really!)
Balcony bound and divorced from the Despair Faction going mental in the stalls, it is still easy to dig the vibe, the unity of souls in this glorious mass ‘sorrow’. And it’s been a long tour from Ukiah, Cal., to the present during which theories and concepts have been developed, refined and fired off. ‘Sorrow’ of the title is that unifying ‘misery loves company’ although Davey avoids propagating his (and guitarist Jade Puget’s) ‘straightedge lifestyle’ [abstention in everything but one thing… it starts with ‘s’ and rhymes with hex, dummy!]…
Havok, with co-founding drummer Adam Carson, Jade and bassist Hunter, lead the army in black – is Goth-gear defo back in? Good, I haven’t taken mine off since Bauhaus split up! – to a promised (sonic) land: ‘Blood Black’, ‘Dancing Through Sunday’, ‘Silver And Gold’, the current hit-single ‘Girl’s Not Grey’… One of the oldies is entitled ‘God Called In Sick Today’ but no one could care less about any old codgers. AFI take you by the ear to carpe diem.
A Fire Inside, indeeedy! I attempt to learn the lyrics from the disc on a drive home but impressions get in the way, as they’ve become my favourite contemporary ‘live’ band… Only second to the stunning Foo Fighters.
SashaS
7-6-2003
AFI’s album ‘Sing The Sorrow’ is available now on Dreamworks/Universal
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