Sing The Sorrow

03/11/2003 5:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Rob O'Connor

Punk bands often resemble those fancy locked-pot pasta strainers you see on TV. No one with two working hands actually needs one, but there's something kinda cool about making something simple even simpler. Except that punk bands have screwed the simplicity rule up. Butch Vig once made Nirvana a ton of money by figuring out a way to take their rudimentary sound and turn it into something that mallrats everywhere could respect and that punks would still take seriously. By walking that thin line, Vig has been given the task of transforming radicals everywhere into something more palatable. This active subversion often works pretty swell. A.F.I. (A Fire Inside) were once a San Francisco punk band you couldn't listen to without thinking you were listening to a Misfits tribute band. But these days with songs like "The Leaving Song," and "The Great Disappointment," they sound like a band that's learned a few things about sounding like every other commercially acceptable punk band without sounding like any of them! That's progress!