AFI’s new online bio has been written by Total Assault, the online marketing company that is handling Crash Love’s online promotion. Below I have listed new info and quotes we have not yet seen.
“Crash Love is certainly not a concept album or rock opera by any stretch, but the songs are generally connected by a greater theme… The album title itself can be construed as a command, as a destructive kind of love, or as a desire for a relationship that’s heading inevitably toward disaster or flameout. The lyrics of some songs trace an arc from adoration to the desire to tear down the object of affection. These songs are written from perspectives both sympathetic and critical, as well from both the inside the relationship and outside.”
“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,” Havok explains. “As well as how this loss of self is sought after rather than resisted… With today’s media, we have such quick and pervasive access to the trivia of anyone’s lives. Everything is intensified and indulged, this desire and ability to know everything you possibly can about anyone, from what thread-count bedsheets they sleep in to whether or not they believe in ghosts.”
“I am so proud of this record. I really believe it’s the best AFI record. It honestly feels like we’ve made our first truly timeless record. We didn’t set out to do that–you can’t set out to do something like that–but it definitely feels like that’s what we’ve achieved: created the album by which we’ll be remembered.”
While Crash Love is the first AFI record to feature such prevalent sociopolitical and observational perspectives, the darkly personal AFI lyrical strain is distinctly present on standout tracks like “Medicate” and its stark portrait of a user/enabler relationship, as well as throughout the ill fated death ride scenario of “End Transmission.” Elsewhere, the newer approach shines on the self-explanatory “Darling I Want To Destroy You,” “Veronica Sawyer Smokes” with couples Jade Puget’s Smiths-esque guitar signatures with a tale of heartbreak brought on by disappointment with a teen idol, “Beautiful Thieves” with its privileged characters whose actions carry no consequences, and “Too Shy To Scream” which sets yearning, distanced adorations against the backdrop of a drumline-inspired shuffle propelled by Hunter Burgan’s bass and Adam Carson’s drumming.
Crash Love is, according to Carson, “the sound of the four of us playing in the same room. It’s by no means stripped down but you really hear the band. Sing The Sorrow–and to certain extent decemberunderground–gave us our first experience with big budget recording, which led to some really dense arrangements, electronics, overdubs and so on. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but this time we came in with 14 songs we were playing really well and wanted to capture that energy.”
Having entered the studio with fully formed and woodshedded songs, Puget and Burgan were freed to come up with novel approaches to each of their instruments–reducing their dependence on strings, keys and other embellishments both organic and electronic. Following a writing process that Puget recalls taking “the better part of a year,” the band convened in late 2008 with producers Joe McGrath and Jacknife Lee to begin work in earnest on what would become Crash Love. “We don’t jam,” Puget explains. “But we had the material so completely formed by the time we began recording that we were able to do things more on the fly this time, to concentrate on sounds as well as performance, to contribute anything that worked, that made a sound that was interesting. So we ended up with sort of a ‘Shabby Chic’ recording aesthetic: The sounds we came up with separately could be really rough and abrasive but assembled together they created an end result that was really beautiful.”
Note: On June 30, 2010 AFI News HQ was hacked and all posts were deleted. This is one of the posts that was affected. The text here was imported from a backup, but all of the original comments are gone and the author credited below is only responsible for reposting in most cases.
