Blaqk Audio seemed a good on paper, but execution-wise it failed miserably IMO - there are other artists out there that are way more worthy of your time if you're interested in all that goth-electro pop kind of thing
yeah, I guess that's the draw Cold Cave (killer band) did have Hunter on board for a tour though, so there... you can have a sick goth pop kinda thing going AND an AFI member too B)
I don't really care for the past three albums much, although Burials has some good moments. I think their best run is Black Sails-Drowning-Sorrow. For me, that's peak AFI.
I love just about every release from this band, b-sides and all. I think every album has stuff I love and stuff that is just meh aside from Sing the Sorrow which I think is damn near a perfect album. If I had to say, I would probably put decemberunderground and Burials pretty close to each other in terms of quality, but like a lot of people, I would place Crash Love near the bottom of the list. That said, I still love some of those songs, just not quite as many as the other albums.
Seeing "The Interview" as their first song of their encore twice on the Crash Love tour made that song jump into my Top 10 possibly Top 5 AFI songs. So good live, especially the end with Davey and Jade going back and forth with the vocals at the end.
But Home Is Nowhere is my favorite closing track on any album. Just pure catharsis and a perfect way to sum up the record. Also some of my favorite lyrics from them.* *technically it's not the last song but let's pretend hidden tracks don't exist.
AFI is one group I try not to listen to anything off the new album before I hear it cus I wanna hear everything in context fresh lol. I'm amped for this, my personal favorite "Era" of AFI was the horrorpunk years (thought admittedly I got into them in the mid 2000s so I missed them directly myself) but I've loved most all of what they done. Like many of you though I do agree, Crash Love is their weakest.
For anyone that may have missed it one of the last know b-sides we knew about that we haven't heard leaked this year.
I wasn't on board with Crash Love for the longest time and thought the b-sides were a million times better, but I revisited it about a year later and there's more songs I like than I dislike on the album. It just had a different feel to it when it came out and I had to get used to it. The only song I don't like is It Was Mine. They usually close their albums so well and this one just doesn't have the same edge to it, imo.
I honestly think Crash Love was just so different that it put a lot of people off at first. I mean, Sing the Sorrow and DU both had the poppier songs, heavy, acoustic and experimental songs and CL just had the same style the whole way though. I don't think there are any bad songs on it if you look at it from a song to song stand point, but can get why as a album as a whole people dismiss it.
Best thing about Crash Love: the bonus tracks. If you can say that "We've Got the Knife" isn't a good song, well then you're just fucking wrong, man.