AFI
Crash Love
Release Date: Sep 29, 2009
Genre(s): Rock, Alternative, Punk
Record label: Interscope
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Album Review: Crash Love by AFI
Acceptable, Based on 2 Critics
Based on rating 8/10
Goth-punk firebrands AFI follow up their smash 2006 effort, Decemberunderground, with the propulsive blast of alterna-glam that is 2009's Crash Love. Sticky with epic swaths of melodic rock and just enough swaggering goth-itude to please the emo-tweens, Crash Love is less mannered than its predecessor and reveals a band exploding with a creative power pop and metal spark. Though lead singer Davey Havok's glitter-goth persona is well intact, it seems tempered here with a bit more punkish muscle and '80s pop croon.
Based on rating 3/10
When you try and neuter a cat it puts up a fight. A guitar, being only in its material reality a carefully wrought piece of wood with some simple electronics wired in, cannot do the same. It acquiesces as humbly as a drugged castrato, with his watering eyes on a shot at the mainstream. The fall of the machine that Guthrie had inscribed with the power to kill fascists, and that Cash had used to incite fire in the victims of the state, is one from height.
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