AFI - Decemberundergrounddownunder

Tue 21st Nov, 2006 in Features

 On a break between shows down under, bassist Hunter Burgan and drummer Adam Carson sat down over coffee with FasterLouder in Sydney to talk about the tour, the making of Decemberunderground, life on and off the road and blood stained hotel rooms.

Despite AFI’s (A Fire Inside) latest album, Decemberunderground, charting at number one on the US Billboard Chart and number three on Australia’s ARIA chart, charismatic bassist of the outfit, Hunter Burgan maintains he doesn’t see his band as a mainstream act.

“I will always consider AFI as kind of an underground band,” Burgan said.”We have an amazingly dedicated fan base and all the credit goes to them. I
would imagine it generated some interest in new listeners this time around,
but the core of that are all our fans who’ve stuck with us for years.”

With Hunter requesting that this interview be typed in 12 point courier font in a
dark green colour, Adam playing air drums and telling stories about blood on
hotel walls; it is almost surreal to be sitting in a crowded and noisy café
interviewing AFI who break the ice by asking myself what thoughts I have on
the current political climate in Australia – in particular the G20 summit.
The relaxed and chatty members of A Fire Inside sip on coffee that has long grown cold and share details about life on the road and the making of the new album.

“Time off is something that we didn’t have on tour – I don’t think its warm
enough but I would love to be at the beach” says A Fire Inside drummer Adam
Carson. “At the end of our last tour we came off the road and had the usual
couple of weeks to decompress,” the sticksman admits. “But then we jumped
straight into the songwriting process. There were 80 songs written for this
album, not all of them were good, but it took time to work out which ones
deserved to be recorded. We wish we could have been completed sooner, but
it’s not done until it’s done. From start to finish, this record has taken
two years to write and record. We were in the studio for nine months just
recording. It was a long process but we wanted to make sure we got it right;
we want to be proud of everything we do.”

Ingeniously released on June 6 (06/06/06), AFI’s Decemberunderground
features the lead single Miss Murder, a song that the band performed
during the MTV Movie Awards. The performance came amid a wave of some very mainstream buzz about AFI; however, the priorities of the band remain
diverse and maintain a certain degree of cautiousness.

“For the first time we were making a follow-up record to something that
people outside our core fan base knew about,” notes Carson. “That does bring
some pressure with it. The biggest challenge was to work out how not to
reproduce ‘Sing the Sorrow’; it was so big and grand so we had to take a
different approach. We had to outdo ourselves without simply trying to be
more epic.”

The band, completed by vocalist Davey Havok who stands in the hotel lobby in
Sydney with a pink suitcase and large dark sunglasses and guitarist Jade
Puget who is surrounded by road crew, tour manager (brother Smith Puget)  who have spent the second half of this year on tour relentlessly promoting Decemberunderground, a record the band wouldn’t finalise for release until they felt the next stage of evolution for AFI had been properly sculpted.

Decemberunderground the group’s most eclectic album yet, a far cry from
AFI’s doom-and-gloom punk-rock roots, mixes disparate influences, from
popular media such as television to Robert Smith. “We will always differ
with regard to influence – that’s really important” Intricate electro-hybrids, thrashing riffs, gang vocals provided by members of the Despair Faction [fan club] and half-time break-downs are all still well and truly in the mix, but the melody is King on Decemberunderground and all the effects exist  behind the hum-able hooks.

“We grew up listening to the radio,” cautiously remarks Carson. “Of course
we were bought up in punk and hardcore, but it is hard for those popular
culture influences not to seep into our work. But if you listened to all our
records back-to-back you would notice the differences throughout our career.
Most of our records are like night and day to each other.
 
There are, however, some elements that remain consistent; even if we are playing a drastically different song there are things that still make it an AFI song.
No matter how clichéd it sounds, we are always pushing ourselves. If we play
something too similar to what we have done before it just bores us.”

“There’s a lot more attention to detail on this record,” Hunter recalls. “We
spent a long time writing it. We refused to rush ourselves. We took our time
not just on every song but on each guitar part, each vocal, each bass line.
We definitely didn’t rush into the studio.”

“Plus we had such a huge amount of material written,” Adam adds. “Condensing
that sheer volume and magnitude down to an album’s worth of songs was very
difficult. We could have made five different records.”

It would appear that change is the only constant one can rely on with this
band, as bassist Hunter adds strength to the sentiment: “The album is a
result of always wanting to do something different; we always gravitate
towards material that is new, that represents something we haven’t done
before.”

“Misinterpretation of the album does present an interesting situation for
me,” Carson acknowledges. “Lyrically this record is more straightforward and
it may put me in a place where people unlock what the songs are about. At
the very least that will challenge me because I’ve never dealt with it
before, but it’s not that frightening.  As in writing the song in the first
place I am putting myself out there for public consumption. I think I’ll be
able to deal with it.”

AFI not only love not fitting in to a particular scene, but they absolutely thrive on it.  ”We never really fitted in with the greater scenes that we were in,” remembers Burgan. “Even when we were a punk band playing hardcore – we were in a scene where everyone either wanted to be Jawbreaker, a quirky pop-punk band or grindcore. We didn’t fit but we continued to play because we liked it and we
have weaved in and out of genres ever since. For me I take comfort in the
people that accept us for who we are.”

Check out the photos from AFI’s Festival Hall gig here