Even at the time, AFI seemed to be operating in a different lane than the other bands seeping into the mainstream. They were not trying to be clever and cheeky with their puns, nor were they using imagery to be a soundtrack to the silent horror of the past. No, AFI was the tortured soul of an artist being presented to us through anthemic punk and melodramatic poetry. "Sugar, We're Going Down" and "Helena" might have been just as infectious as "Girl's Not Grey" was from this record, but only one of those songs tugs at you with the weight of saying something profound. Or at least giving us the impression it is.
There is pretension in these songs, but it is the overblown over-compensation for not being able to fully explain what pain feels like to someone else, and not in the 'look how clever I am' way. I love those classic Fall Out Boy records too, but they wink-and-nod so hard a you the face staring back is distorted and unidentifiable. AFI took the same elements of emo, but wrapped them up in a delivery that makes us feel like we aren't alone staring up at the night sky and the "Silver And Cold". That is what I have come to see as the strength of great emo; the ability to find community in sadness, to at least rob it of the power to isolate us from everyone else.
That is why the album's immediacy and pop-punk hooks are so important. Rather than wallowing in the kind of tortured howling that pushes away everyone who isn't at the depths of their dispair, these songs are able to span from one end to the other of the sine wave created by placing a smile next to a frown. Everyone was able to find something in this music to embrace, and that diversity lets us find the connections that tie all of us to the same experience. It makes no obvious sense for this music to appeal to the various groups and sub-cultures it does, so we perhaps see bits of ourselves where we would not otherwise look.
"From Under The Cork Tree" was the album that put all of this music on the map for me, and it's the most technicolor of them. Fall Out Boy was painting with a wider palate, smearing clownish colors on their faces for the laughs. My Chemical Romance made "The Black Parade", which tried to use epic scope to put our various levels of issues and depressions into perspective. AFI was more focused, using the narrow scope of colors and sounds to burn the feeling into us every time we listened to the album. And listen we did, again and again.
Danny's voice shifting from soft crooning to raspy screams was the Jekyl and Hyde in us all, where the same feelings of pain were sometimes enough to make us scream, and sometimes too much to speak of. Of the records I've been talking about, this is the only one that feels like real and personal emotion, the kind we feel on a visceral level. There is less detachment between us and the music, so when the drums play a march as they lead into a rousing chorus, it captures the swell of a fit of rage in a way the others can't.
Records that get better with age are an exception to the rule. "Sing The Sorrow" is one of them, as every year I feel the music more than I did the last time. It was the last of these emo albums I found myself getting into, but it's the one I can honestly say is the most human of them. One might be the more fun album to revisit, another the bigger artistic statement, but "Sing The Sorrow" is the most important of these albums, because it's the one that still feels relevant to life's journey. Sometimes we do need to bleed ourselves of the toxicity in us, and that is a job "Sing The Sorrow" does better than anything else of its time.
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