I GUESS YOU WOULD CONSIDER ALICE IN CHAINS A "GUILTY" PLEASURE....

Damon Albarn of Blur once described the band he was part of, Blur, as an"anti-grunge band" he said, "Well, that's good. If punk was about getting rid of hippies, then I'm getting rid of grunge."

I admit I hated grunge with a passion and thought most of the music that came out of the Seattle scene in the early 90’s was crap....Bands like Pearl Jam and Nirvana somehow found a way to meld the most commercial watered down aspects of punk, heavy metal, and horrid garbage late 70’s AOR bands such as Journey and Kansas into genuinely uninspired unoriginal music that a lot of “me too” people latched on to (Remember grunge musicians for all their public protestations against fame and the music industry to the contrary made highly commercial music).

That is not to say that they weren’t any good bands who were linked to the grunge scene....I have always liked Soundgarden a band with a great sound, a tremendous lead guitarist and enough goofy spaciness to make one not mind the blatant Led Zeppelin-isms.

And lately I have found myself listening a lot to Alice in Chains....

Alice in Chains were a hard band to pigeonhole....Their first cd FACELIFT had a really lean metal sound, big riffs, and powerful “down” vocals....I guess Black Sabbath (the good early 70’s period)is what it would remind me of most.

Before releasing their heavier than heavy second release, they released an acoustic ep entitled SAP, a strange move for a band known primarily a harder sound....Next was their second full length cd (and my favorite) DIRT which contains more than an hour of truly scorching dense metal....This was followed by yet another ep however JAR OF FLIES wasn’t just acoustic it also included strings....It’s an amazing work and shows a group of musicians who have freed themselves from the restraints of a musical genre....Last comes their third full length cd ALICE IN CHAINS which finds the band effortlessly shifting between the different sounds they had experimented with before....There are both semi-acoustic ballads and the usual heavy asskickers.

For me, the late Layne Staley’s vocals are the primary weapon here although Jerry Cantrell is a fluid guitarist and became more of the dominant songwriter as time went on....He also functioned as a second vocalist a la Noel Gallagher and these contributions are also worthwhile.

The recent Alice in Chains reunion?....Well I can’t imagine the band without Staley but that’s just my opinion.

Here are my favorite Alice in Chains songs....WOULD?, HEAVEN BESIDE YOU, JUNKHEAD, I STAY AWAY, NO EXCUSES, ROOSTER,WHAT THE HELL HAVE I, LOVE HATE LOVE....