It was everywhere in the ’90s, lining the front shelves of record stores and coffee shops in equal measure: the tired “acoustic album.” You couldn’t get away from it, whether MTV was sponsoring it for the likes of Nirvana and…KISS? I realize it’s unfair to lump Alice in Chains in with the profit-grubbing going on (on the part of the labels, though I’m sure Simmons/Stanley saw the trend lit with dollar signs); they were already baring their Seattle-soaked souls on 1992’s Sap EP. But somehow the combination of Dirt immediately entering godhood upon its release and the omnipresence of “I Stay Away” and “No Excuses” soured me to the point that I waited over 30 years to hear Alice in Chains, the band’s proper follow-up.
God, I am such a dumbass.
I mean, of course I heard the singles—the chorus to “Heaven Beside You” still whispers to me when I’m distracted. But by then I was moving on to other things and other moods. I was graduating college, trying to figure out what to do with my life, and chasing these weirder, alternative sounds from the likes of Radiohead and the Flaming Lips; meanwhile I was also digging further into the past—I’m pretty sure the mid-’90s was ground zero for my obsessions with both Prince and David Bowie.
Thirty-one years later, I’m still here, looking in both directions at once.
I started writing about Alice in Chains over three weeks ago. I haven’t stopped listening; this afternoon I fell asleep and woke up to the ominous opening of “Frogs,” and I was once again reminded of this draft, and words that wouldn’t come. Yesterday my freshman roommate came over for a few hours of barbecue and guitar; he’s got me committed to learning some songs, and I want to learn “Grind”—I love how it moves from this lumbering doom riff in the verse, only to open to a beautiful (if melancholic) harmonized chorus. Learning how bad Layne’s heroin addiction was. Finally understanding, more than 30 years after first discovering them, how much of what I thought I loved about Layne’s vocals was actually Jerry Cantrell. And that “Grind” itself is one of the few songs where Cantrell also wrote the lyrics, making the song’s dire warnings both angry and despairing. Such a great song, such a killer way to open your next full-length.
Both “Brush Away” and “Sludge Factory” distance the band from the acclaim their Jar of Flies EP brought them. And even though “Heaven Beside You” remains my least favorite track on the album, it’s a welcome reprieve from the oppressive heaviness. It gives just enough of a breath before the bouncing rage of “Head Creeps” serves another reminder that I’m a dumbass for putting away things I thought I no longer had any use for.
That includes the stupid prejudices of a 20-something back in the ’90s.
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