AFI- Crash Love (**)

“Crash Love” can mean many different things.

If you’re Davey Havok, AFI’s lead singer, you’ll swear that Crash Love is your band’s strongest release yet, a gripping lamentation on celebrity iconography and fleeting experiences. In fact, Havok has even gone on record saying, “The record is really more about how the great attraction to inappropriately shared intimacies, carefully constructed personas, and the loss of a sense of self can affect an entire world…” He also assures listeners that it’s also a step forward in the band’s evolution, stripping back the dense electronics of 2006’s Decemberundergound in favor of more immediate rock sounds.

Sweeping social commentary from the guy that echoed Winona Rider in saying his whole life was one, big, dark room just 3 albums ago.

Yet if you’re part of the legions of AFI faithfuls that will seek out the record, you’ll find that Havok (Along with guitarist Jade Puget, bassist Hunter Burgan, and drummer Adam Carson) have provided fans with something different. Instead, you’ll find that AFI have crashed a gold covered plane filled with their childhood musical influences into the towers of everything AFI once stood for in terms of originality.

Crash Love is an exhausting record. This is not because the sounds and themes are difficult to dissect, but because AFI sound so complacent throughout the disc’s 12 tracks. It’s downright frustrating listening to a band, that’s evolved so purposefully over their last two albums, make something so slick, by-the-numbers and conservative here. Where the band used to surprise listeners with explosive choruses, anthematic sing-a-longs, and tense musical moments, Crash Love offers up slickly produced stadium rock that would rather channel The Smiths and Bowie instead of Nine Inch Nails and Danzig.

“Torch Song” does a good job of misleading listeners off the bat. Amidst thunderous drums, warm bass, and twisting lead work, AFI treat listeners to an expansive opener that recalls the call-and-response of their younger years. Against Puget’s staccato riffs, Havok croons, “I’d tear out my soul/For/You my dear…” While light on the gloom and heavy on gang vocals, “Torch Song” acts as the album’s brightest moment.

Sadly, the album’s biggest problem comes down to the fact that AFI sound too much like their influences. “Veronica Sawyer Smokes” comes across as a Morrissey throw away, and “It Was Mine” is all power-pop-meets-Queen with disastrous results. What used to make AFI unique was their ability to synthesize their influences and splatter them across a hardcore punk frame.

Now, the band seems bored with trying to be innovative and is stuck simply imitating.

Gone is the sweeping dark grandeur of Sing The Sorrow and the cold/electronic ambiance of Decemberunderground. Instead, Crash Love revels in guitars that chime rather than crunch, and arrangements that never take off in addition to feeling out of character. “Too Shy To Scream,” is a chunky glam number with a swing shuffle, a song who’s uptempo hooks feel out of place against the supposed “edgy” lyrics of “I'd die/If you only met my eyes/Before you pass by/Will you pause to break my heart?” While the band has explored song arrangements foreign to punk in the past, it has never come across as forced and has haphazard as it does on Crash Love.

But perhaps the most disconcerting part about the record is how lazy Havok’s writing has become. As AFI has evolved, he became an expert exploring the darkest recesses of the human soul. While he always wrote highly melodic hooks and choruses, Havok was careful not to let cheese creep into his troubled prose.

On Crash Love, however, Havok embraces every clichéd writing trick in the book. “Darling, I Want To Destroy You” features trite lines such as, “I must confess/I am over dressed/Not impressed/Are you not impressed? /Darling I want to…” On “I Am Trying Very Hard To Be Here,” Havok leads his band in calling out, “FLASH FLASH CAR CRASH/We’re not fixtures/QUICK NOW QUICK/Take our pictures!” It’s heartbreaking, and over digitally muted guitars and sterile drumming, AFI come across less as artists and more as gimmicks.

Yet despite the sour taste long time fans might feel with Crash Love, the album does have some shining moments. “End Transmission” creates a chilling atmosphere with Puget’s syrupy guitar lines and Burgan’s moody bass. The album’s single, “Medicate,” injects some life into the album’s second half with a blistering solo while “Cold Hands” features some aggressive grooves. While none of the tracks maintain the listener's attention for their whole running time, AFI do flash occasional moments of brilliance within the album's running time.

However, it’s all too little too late. AFI always prided themselves in their ruthless experimentation because it was earnest and authentic, but Crash Love comes across as neither. Instead, AFI have created an album that does not play to their strengths, but an album that captures a once fearless band as a shadow of their former selves.

Celebrity has taken a toll on this band, and ironically, in whining about movie stars and car crashes it seems that AFI has become the very thing they attempted to dissect. It’s with this that perhaps another meaning can be gleaned from “Crash Love:” The moment where one’s desires converge into a large mess that no longer resembles what you once felt attached to.

From that perspective, at least the album is appropriately titled.

Key Cuts: Torch Song, End Transmission, Medicate

Sounds Like: Wish (The Cure), The Golden Age Of Grotesque (Marilyn Manson), Strangeways Here We Come (The Smiths)

Click on the artwork to sample some of Crash Love for yourself!