AFI Concert

When the singer for the Explosion, one of the opening acts at the Avalon Ballroom this Saturday night, held the mic stand out over the audience, he was a beggar begging for loose change. When the roadies for A Fire Inside tested the fog machines, after the Explosion had left the stage, half the crowd erupted in chant.

Without such a rabidly devoted crowd, the AFI show would have been just another loud, obnoxious punk fiasco. Loud it was, but devoid of substance it was not. The opening track on Sing the Sorrow, the bands latest and most widely received release, starts with a reverberating chant hollered over a raucous, tribal beat. When a recording of that beat blasted through the air as the lights dimmed for AFI, the crowd chanted through the first verse sans band.

The band finally sauntered out among the shadows, the drummer replaced the recorded beat and the singer joined the audience midway through the song. AFI's brand of music is half Satanic ritual, half old school moshpit punk. The circle pit and the sing-along choruses mixed with some fog and drama is not a new conconction, but AFI seems to have an especially good feel for mob manipulation. Their shout-choruses beg for a pumped fist and a strained throat.

Before launching into the chorus of their breakout hit "Totalimmortal," the band let the crowd fester and then when it seemed it was just going to move on to another number, the singer, Davey Havoc, screamed an intro and dove into the audience, letting the crowd and the rest of the band scream it away. Most of the show proceeded the same way, the audience just as loud as the band.

The theatrics came to a head during another Sorrow tune when the pale lanky front man walked out onto the outstretched palms of his stable fan base, all the while wailing at top of his lungs. Although a touching display, this was one of the few instances of crowd/band showmanship in which there was a genuine connection as humans speaking to other humans.

The crowd, skaters and Goths and college kids, punks and trendy alternative radio fans, were just a seething energetic mass paying tribute to the current kings of depressing, angry music. The singer, looking like Edward Scissorhands, strode up and down the stage with his despair on display. At one point the band left him alone on his knees, screaming a few lines over the sound of a lonesome string quartet, on a stage flooded with bloody light. Powerful, yes, but there was no real intimacy that existed outside of the crowd's effort.

The drama existed in the gloomy lyricism, dark imagery, and the kinetic energy inherent in shout choruses-but not in band/fan interaction or even in musicianship. The inability to keep up with the production of Sing the Sorrow, the release that recently pushed them to the forefront of goth rock, had to be overshadowed somehow. The only instance in which the disparity between skill and showmanship became glaringly apparent: when guitar player Jade Puget fumbled over the opening riff to their latest radio single, "Girl's Not Grey."

Perhaps not so strange is the fact that the band played only one song from their non-gothpunk catalogue, sticking to the humorless shadowsongs that made AFI such a hit among manic-depressive girls. The softer songs did evoke some sort of emotion but I felt on the outside of some depressed punk teen club. Still, I found myself swept away, screaming along with the rest, falling in line with the cult that follows A Fire Inside.

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