AFI - SILVER BLEEDS THE BLACK SUN [LP]

1 The Bird of Prey 2 Behind the Clock 3 Holy Visions 4 Blasphemy and Exccess 5 Spear of Truth 6 Ash Speck in a Green Eye 7 Voidward, I Bend Back 8 Marguerite 9 A World Unmade 10 Nooneunderground Now with their twelfth album, Silver Bleeds the Black Sun..., AFI are once again at the start of a bold new chapter, only this time they've even managed to surprise themselves. "We started with something that sounded like Echo & the Bunnymen," explains guitarist Jade Puget, who produced and engineered the album. "But eventually we ended up with this melange of death rock and post-punk-all this stuff from the late '70s and early '80s that we grew up on, like Sisters of Mercy, and Bauhaus, and Siouxsie and the Banshees." The goal became making an album with a singular mood, something dreamy and ethereal, and the band members found themselves diving headfirst into influences that had always been deeply embedded in AFI's musical core, but now were being brought to the forefront. Silver Bleeds the Black Sun... is dark and otherworldly, but also grandiose and stately, biting and beautiful in equal measure-in other words, it's very AFI, yet not quite like any version of the band you've ever heard before.