Issue 6: AFI – Black Sails in the Sunset

On holding up.

Part I: A musical bond

It’s some time in 1998 or 1999 and my buddy Daniel gives me a tape he made. It has some bands on it he thought might be up my alley. This tape contained, amongst other records, Shut Your Mouth and Open Your Eyes by Bay Area hardcore punk band AFI. Or, well, they were a hardcore punk band at the time, anyway. Daniel did me a huge favour with that tape.

Throughout my teenage rebellious (heh) years, he was my musical true north.

Daniel dyed his hair.
Daniel pierced his own lip.
Daniel played guitar and was in a band.
Daniel was hella cool.

Our musical bond was forged on a class camping trip. After a day of responsible activities that have fully exited my brain at this point, the teachers took us to a local youth center where us thirteen-year-olds were allowed some time to pretend we were clubbing. DJ’s playing pop music of the day, the popular girls dancing, the popular boys falling over themselves trying to get close to said girls but still leaving space for Jesus because lord, there were teachers around – that kind of thing.

For a 13-year-old with a heightened sense of musical snobbery, this was hell.

From across the dance floor, I saw Daniel leave out the back door and I said to myself: “That’s an amazing idea. I want to do that as well.” So I bolted across the room, followed him out and we chilled in the alley behind the building. Or rather, we sulked and complained about the music and implied very heavily between the two of us that we were very much cooler than those squares in there.

A few minutes later, some dude that seemed to come straight out of the background cast of Wayne’s World, and who later turned out to be one of the “DJ’s”, found us and asked if we were alright. ‘How nice’, I thought at the time, though in hindsight he was probably checking in to make sure we weren’t doing any illegal drugs with all these grownups around.

“Yeah man,” Daniel replied. “It’s just this music, it fucking sucks. I don’t want to be in there.” To our surprise, DJ Hesher420 agreed and let us know they simply got the request to play popular stuff from the teachers. But hey, he’d throw on some ‘alternative’ stuff for us if we wanted it. And did we ever.

What a way to show these plebs what sophisticated music taste we had by bouncing around a pretend ‘mosh pit’ on a youth center’s dance floor to such obscure bands as… Korn. And NOFX. Pretty sure there was some Pearl Jam in there as well. Anyway, fuck off with your judgment, we were thirteen.

Since that moment, Daniel and I were… pretty good friends. Maybe not inseparable, or best friends, but we both liked weird, often loud music and we would share tapes every time we would come across a kickass band. Both coming from rural towns with nary a dial-up connection between us, this was not just a hobby, it was a lifeline. You hear something cool? Something that makes you feel something? Make a tape, and share it.

Like Daniel did with the AFI tape he made me. Besides Shut Your Mouth, it contained some tracks off of previous AFI albums, with the B-side having a Guttermouth album. That one didn’t stick as well as AFI did. Probably for the best.

Shut Your Mouth quickly became the soundtrack of the year. That tape was the only one that saw the inside of my Walkman for several months. Before I finally found something else to musically cling on to, the quality of the tape had degraded to such an extent that it might as well have been recorded at the bottom of a swimming pool.

When AFI’s next album, Black Sails in the Sunset, was set to come out, we were stoked. But even though the musical style gap between Shut Your Mouth and its predecessors was pretty big, nothing prepared us for what the band became on Black Sails.

Part II: A consuming experience

On the particulars I’m not quite certain anymore, but now it sure feels like everyone in our small friend group had purchased the CD simultaneously on the day it launched, only to gather again at school the next day to talk about it with bated breath.

“Did you hear…?”
“But that thing with the bwa-wawawawa-…”
“You think that’s a double pedal?”
“What do you think he meant with…?”

The album consumed us, it was the only thing we could talk about. It was heavier, moodier, at times brandishing a more lighter touch and therefore also more mysterious than most of the music we had been listening to before.

All that older stuff, Shut Your Mouth included, was mostly just about being angry. Black Sails was about melancholy, loss, the ability to feel down about life but also the possibility of making it better by being better.

The lyrics were more elaborate, they mystified us to the point where we felt they were a puzzle that needed to be solved. Of course we were sixteen years old and had the collective emotional maturity of a kumquat, but thanks to it’s slightly goth-y edge it was challenging in a way most punk simply wasn’t – at least not the stuff we listened to at the time.

It’s also no surprise that lines like “The vibrant heart / So quickly growing old / The warmest eyes / So quickly growing cold” resonated the way they did with a moody teenager. And you know what? They still do. Because right after this bridge in the song is a fucking ripper of a chorus that invites singing along. The record has urgency, the riffs drive the unique vocals to the foreground, not to mention the – still – cool singalong moments. Woah-oah your heart out to this one, friends!

Black Sails quickly turned into a unifying record in our group of friends. Everyone was on board with it, everyone was entranced by it, to different degrees. While there would be music that caught our collective attention again, we were never as locked in on a record as we were on this one.

Part III: Moving on

Coming back now to Black Sails, it stands out how well this record holds up. How many records from your youth do that? I have a pile of CD’s that will tell you the percentage is low.

And don’t misunderstand this: it’s not nostalgia that keeps the music good. Taken on its own, and re-listening to it over and over again, it just never fails to excite and hype me up.

Now knowing what musical direction AFI would turn to over the years, the music on Black Sails still feels unique. It captures a band with one foot in the hardcore punk scene and one foot on its way to new things. The direction became quite clear once The Art of Drowning came out, of course, and with the hardcore influence slowly fading with each release, AFI lost its shine for most of us after Sing the Sorrow.

(Petty underground snobbery aside, it remains impressive how each release since, still distinctly feels like AFI. Seriously, give their most recent record, Bodies, a listen and tell me you don’t recognise it, despite the differences.)

And yet, even after decades, Black Sails still stands out – there’s just not quite anything that comes close to this. Most bands who try to rip off AFI tend to start at around Sing the Sorrow, the successful major label debut. But in doing so, they tend to skip over the formative early era and especially Black Sails, which has retained an edge the band sanded down over the years in its pursuit of a smoother sound.

When the band moved into that different musical direction, it made me sad. Here was a band that united our friend group, a band we could all rally around – and when that passed and so did our connection.

Correlation is not causation, of course, and AFI as an entity had nothing to do with our friendship. But up until Sing the Sorrow, the music would still evoke those warm feelings.

Daniel and I grew apart. Physically more than anything. Different colleges, different cities, new friend groups. It was never a concerned effort on either of our parts, these things just tend to happen, I suppose. We see each other irregularly, when the stars align. Most recently two years ago when we went to see The Get Up Kids as they came around on tour.

I don’t think we’ll ever be as close as we were then. But we were close then, close enough to swap tapes, and I hold that experience dear.

Now, years later, listening to Black Sails once again, the same feeling emerges. The band can do whatever it wants – in fact, I hope they’re doing what they want. For whatever music they choose to make now, they gave us Black Sails then.

And even now, that’s enough.