“What The Hell Have I?” (from The Last Action Hero soundtrack, 1993) Their fully realized music was proof enough of life in between.ĩ. His band’s death fetish was certain from “We Die Young” to “Died,” their opening salvo and closing procession.
Eventually it turns out the protagonist may be in heaven searching for a lost friend: “My heart’s is dried up, beating slow / It’s been deflating since you died.” In the end, it doesn’t matter whom it’s about or how much Staley’s grim outlook imitated his grim reality and vice versa. “I could climb until I reach where angels reside / Ask around to find out where the junkies applied,” he sang, warmly layered under the usual quilts of Cantrell counterpoint, thick-mixed blues-rock chug and unusual melodic turns as connective sinew. “Died,” the finale from 1999’s 3xCD (plus CD-Rom - ’90s, man) clearinghouse, Music Bank, was no “Keep Me In Your Heart,” but shared a spirit with Warren Zevon’s usual métier: Vantablack comedy. There’s no actual way around the sad, hardly-precedented-yet-unsurprising fact that the last song Layne Staley ever released was his literal farewell.
They have a lot of great songs, but these are their 10 best. They bent guitars and voices into miserably beautiful shapes, and sometimes radio agreed. They mastered the whole of ’90s rock dynamism: short, long, fast, slow, loud, soft - a song was usually excavated beneath all that intentional and sadistic murk in AIC’s audio and minds. A simple enough riff like “Got Me Wrong” was as catchy as anything thrown to the airwaves in 1991 and the Zeppelin-esque knottiness of 1990’s “Confusion” as elaborate as any art-rock. (Hell, Jerry Cantrell’s solo “Psychotic Break” and “Cut You In,” with Kinney’s trademark odd drumming, would’ve been fearsome additions to any post- Dirt AIC record.)Ĭantrell and Staley’s nearly always harmonized vocals, Mike Starr and then Mike Inez’s oblong bass figures, and Kinney’s off-kilter beats made for something more unique than simply Staley’s groan, whose imitators would go on to ruin mainstream rock radio for a few years (shouts to legitimate slapper “Touch, Peel, And Stand” though). Even DuVall-era material like 2009’s silly “Check My Brain” and 2013’s ambitious “Lab Monkey” belong in the picture. Dirt and Unplugged are the master texts, but they could’ve filled two more. Even after frontman Layne Staley tragically died in 2002, Alice In Chains’ two albums with the uncanny Staley soundalike William DuVall (2009’s Black Gives Way To Blue and 2013’s The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here) have enjoyed success and respect that’s almost as equidistant from utter embarrassment as it is from AC/DC’s best-selling upheaval with Brian Johnson.īut AIC have made as much great, distinctive music as any of the above-named bands, just scattered across endearingly odd products (1991’s Sap EP was a reverb-y “acoustic” thing named for a prophecy drummer Sean Kinney had in a dream) and a few missed opportunities (neither 1999’s box set Music Bank nor its pared-down Nothing Safe: The Best Of The Box were satisfying-enough homes for the uncollected material they contained). That’s an enviable position to be in - how many bands would love to be purely regarded by the fans? Even the angst-ridden Tool, from nearly the same era, are a little too ripe for parody and their supporters a little too cultish for the kind of almost utopian evenhandedness that these guys receive.
They more or less broke even they’re widely beloved by people who don’t need much convincing, and they also stay out of Radiohead or Neutral Milk Hotel’s way in ’90s compendia. 1995’s Alice In Chains isn’t anyone’s idea of a classic, though 1996’s Unplugged really should be it’s the Unplugged In New York to Dirt’s Nevermind. Most ’90s alt-scholars agree that Dirt was their magnum opus, and the Billboard #1 Jar Of Flies EP is held in similarly high regard.
They weren’t lambasted like Stone Temple Pilots, but they weren’t lavished upon like Nirvana, or Pearl Jam, or Soundgarden’s eventual breakthrough, Superunknown, either. Alice In Chains are widely revered by hard rock fans (and guitarists especially), though their critical standing is secretly kind of a wash.