Dan J’s Website

First, I love the title and the cover art. Basically any reference to "black sun" gets me, because as a teenager I loved Soundgarden's Black Hole Sun, and one of my favourite books was Black Sun Rising by C.S. Friedman...

So there's some aspect of nostalgia there. And, indeed, the sound of this album feels nostalgic to the gloomy goth-rock of, say the '80s, bands like (TK I can't think of their names... sisters of mercy? the cure? no, who else?). Though my nostalgia for those acts comes from much later, the early 2000s, when my friend Jay and I used to haunt the weekly Goth Night at a hole in the wall upstairs in Osborne Village.

'80s music and culture is a funny one: I was born in the early '80s, but was therefore too young to grow up with that culture. I tend to think it's the music and culture that's popular when you're a teenager that shapes which decade you are "of"—so I'm firmly a nineties kid and not an eighties kid.

I discovered AFI around the same time as Goth Night; my college buddy Eric turned me on to them, alongside punk and hardcore stuff like Avenged Sevenfold, Rise Against, Alexisonfire, and Anti-Flag. I don't listen to any of that stuff as much as I used to, my early twenties having been much more fertile soil for the semi-formed rage that attuned itself to that music.

AFI is probably the most enduring of that era's favourites; I've seen them in concert many times (h/t to my friend Chelsea for flying out here to see them with me again when she'd already seen them in her hometown!), and still like throwing on the classics. Like most bands with a multiple-decade career, the period where I first discovered them tends to remain my favourite¹: Sing the Sorrow, Decemberunderground, and Crash Love tending to be the most my taste, compared to the punkier stuff that came before or the stuff that came after, which, like Silver Bleeds the Black Sun, feel gloomier and, I don't know, throw-backier, than that sweet spot.