AFI
Crash Love
(DGC/Interscope)
Rating: 
For nearly ten years, AFI was a by-the-book California hardcore band. Then, around the turn of the millennium, singer Davey Havok started wearing nail polish and luxuriating in catchy, over-the-top goth-pop. While the diehards may have been scandalized, a nation of sad-eyed tweens were (relatively) cheered. Album number eight, Crash Love, might be the band’s best yet: a consistently strong set of radio-ready misery, with the deliciously dippy “Veron ica Sawyer Smokes” relocating the Smiths to Suburbia, U.S.A.
