IN REVIEW: AFI - "AFI (The Blood Album)"

If it feels like AFI are hardened veterans at this point, it's because that's absolutely true; it's easy to forget that Sing the Sorrow, their 2003 breakthrough, was actually their sixth record (this one marks album #10). It's also easy to forget that the band encountered some pretty fierce backlash to Sing the Sorrow from fairweather fans bemoaning the shift from more standard punk fare that occurred over the course of those first five records. That fickle criticism follows them to this day, and at this point it feels like silly, petty shit talk. Consider The Blood Album, the culmination of over two decades of maturation and an album that has echoes of all of AFI's past lives while continuing to offer new ideas.

Even fans of their emo/goth commercial zenith may be surprised at the growth here, especially if they hadn't been paying attention during AFI's last couple of album cycles. Often lumped in with all of those eyeliner-and-razors emo upstarts that captivated the minds of angry teens in the aughts (perhaps ever so slightly unfairly), the band shed much of that aesthetic years ago. There are a few moments of typical angsty emo fare here, sure (Hidden Knives most blatantly nostalgic for that period), but the majority of The Blood Album finds AFI sonically more or less where they should be ten albums in; confident enough to revisit their past without outright aping it, while edging their sound toward a more nuanced, less dated position. It's a consistent (if two or three tracks too long) album by a band that has grown up with their fans, and those who've stayed around this long shouldn't be disappointed in the least.

January 20, 2017 • Concord
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