Do the little grrls understand?
If AFI is the new face of melancholic rock, is Davey Havok the new Robert Smith?
Melissa Martin

Somewhere in the midst of all the Hurley T-shirts, Converse hi-tops, and tennis wristbands at this year’s Warped Tour, Davey Havok must have felt just a little out of place.

After all, the AFI frontman looks a far cry from your average, everyday punk rocker. A tattooed, vinyl-clad androgene with a ghostlike lantern jaw, Havok looks like the type of guy the Simple Plan boys would have beaten up in high school.

He’s sensitive, too, and he sings with a tortured voice more inspired by Dante than D.O.A. – which doesn’t help his cause in a world of Blink-inspired tomfoolery.

“As for Warped Tour, I don’t think we fit in too cleanly,” sighs drummer Adam Carson, who co-founded the band with Havok in 1992.

“Obviously our roots are punk rock and hardcore, and that’s where the majority of our fans come from. I don’t know how we fit in now… it’s not like we’re this radical band, we don’t have a fresh new sound. But what we do blurs the lines. It’s hard to put us into a specific category.”

Almost in spite of the fact they don’t fit into a box, AFI (short for A Fire Inside) has made the unlikely rise from straight-edge hardcore heroes in the mid-’90s to goth-punk (or screamo) icons with last March’s release of Sing the Sorrow.

It is a bizarre trend. Sing the Sorrow charted as high as No. 5 on the Billboard charts, despite an almost complete lack of commercial radio airplay, and AFI was a prime draw at Warped tour.

Who would have bet on that back when AFI were a bunch of brazen, fresh-out-of-high-school punks tearing up the West End Cultural Centre so many years ago?

The roots of the band run deep. After Havok and Carson formed the band as students at California’s Ukiah High School, AFI quickly gave up the suburban teenage life and hit the road, touring with Rancid and churning out a steady stream of high-impact hardcore.

The addition of guitarist Jade Puget (who had known the band since they all attended school together) seemed to be the force that sealed the deal on AFI’s evolution.

The group’s first release after Puget’s arrival, 1999’s Black Sails in the Sunset, was an altogether more complex entity than previous albums, leaning more closely to the Cure-inspired melancholy that would ultimately become the band’s signature, evolving through 2000’s The Art of Drowning to culminate in Sing.

Most of AFI’s new fan base – which, from an informal scan of Internet message boards, seems primarily composed of teenage girls – aren’t old enough to remember when the band released 1997’s Shut Your Mouth and Open Your Eyes, a brisk and vicious hardcore assault.

Now 28, Havok started touring when he was 19 years old, when many of his current fans would have been starting kindergarten.

The popular LiveJournal Web site lists no less than 23 multi-user communities dedicated to AFI and its various band members. This is where where fans write odes to the band, such as “My favorite part of Davey would be his arms! I mean, they are really sexy arms... bleedin’ over the top hottttt....xxxxxx hottttt arms!”

Hardly the most insightful musical commentary, but it’s this sort of fanaticism that has made AFI such a powerful force.

Despite all of the hordes of self-designated “Havok Whores,” AFI’s music is much deeper than the average platitudinal pseudo-punk. If the lyrics on Sing the Sorrow betray far more complexity than the average 15-year-old is likely to have experienced, then the band shouldn’t be blamed for the youth and energy of its following.

However, it has garnered snippy pot-shots from non-fans, mostly circulating around Havok’s rumoured bisexuality.

Essentially, AFI has become the Korn of the post-nu-metal generation. While Korn and its ilk have made millions from manipulation of the rage and angst of teen boys, AFI has done the same with intense sadness, both real and marketed.

Its official fan club is called the Despair Faction, and Havok is fond of oh-so-gothic song titles such as Miseria Cantare and Malleus Maleficarum.

Whether this new depressed-music fad represents a social shift is yet to be seen... but for what it’s worth, anger is out (Marilyn Manson and Limp Bizkit have slipped), and raw emotional sensitivity is in thanks to the likes of Dashboard Confessional.

AFI blends both approaches: while the band still unleashes doses of its old hardcore vengeance, Havok adds a more subtle heart. So where does that take the band?

Shedding a few tears every night, it seems.

“It is an emotional record,” says Carson of Sing the Sorrow. “I find myself every night feeling a certain way while doing a certain song. The new ones are more challenging, there’s more dynamic.”

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