Aiden, Conviction

Back when I first heard Seattle quintet Aiden’s much-lauded debut, Our Gang’s Dark Oath, I had pretty high hopes. “Finally,” I thought, “maybe somebody can convincingly combine all that emo-modern-rock stuff with the kind of old-school gothiness the four ‘subversive’ kids who went to my high school continually got beaten up for. Now that would be something to hear…” Sadly, the album didn’t live up to its promise, instead shoehorning textbook screamo caterwauling into those enticingly dark goth-rock songs. Throw in all the annoying samples, and gah… The combination just didn’t work, at least not for me.

This time out, though, singer Wil Francis has dumped the hardcore growl in favor of a much smoother, more emotive style and eschewed the fanboy movie quotes to focus on actually playing the songs, and y’know what? It works. Where Oath felt like a bunch of hardcore kids pretending they were vampires and werewolves and whatnot, Conviction dives headfirst into goth, and not just in terms of visual style (which the band’s pretty much always had, tattoos notwithstanding) but in terms of the music itself.

From the piano-inflected melancholy of “The Opening Departure” onward, there’s a gloomy, murky resignedness to the whole damn album, a genuine feeling of hopelessness that makes me want to go dress all in black and wander the streets by my house late at night (oh, wait — I do that already; whoops…). Conviction, as a whole, makes me think of the Sisters of Mercy or The Cure in their heyday, if their tourbuses were hijacked by a band of time-traveling, Anne Rice-loving emo kids from the late ’90s and driven off to somewhere where the sun never really rises in the morning.

It helps, by the by, that Francis and his compatriots (guitarists Angel Ibarra & Jake Wambold, bassist Nick Wiggins, and drummer Jake Davison) have obviously been working on the songwriting this time out. The themes are pretty much the same, of course — doomed love, hopes dashed, suicide, darkness, lies, neglected kids, etc. — but it sounds like the band spent a heck of a lot more time making the songs flow together nicely. Because of that, tracks like “One Love,” “Darkness” (which includes some truly epic guitar in the chorus), “She Will Love You,” “Teenage Queen” (which sounds like the Subways’ “Rock & Roll Queen” tarted up in makeup and dragged to a blacklight rave), and “Moment” suck me in even when I don’t want ’em to.

The crowning moment comes partway through “Son of Lies,” which finally does what Our Gang’s Dark Oath hinted that the band could by uniting the hardcore and goth-rock sides of Aiden’s personality. The drums pound mercilessly, the guitars carve shards out of Francis’s half-sung/half-muttered vocals, the howling gang vocals erupt out of the speakers, and guest vocalist Howard Jones of Boston metal gods Killswitch Engage briefly lends his trademark near-operatic swoon, all of which makes the track an out-and-out masterpiece of darkly imagined rock.