Alice in Chains

Human depression and misery are such prevailing emotions all across the board, no matter where you live, what time period you’re in or what the cause is – people are prone to misery and sadness for reasons so widely varying that it’s almost impossible to shove all the reasons under the same umbrella. But the remarkable thing about people is that we get better, we move on, we adapt. We have the capacity to change and heal our wounds and continue living life. We have so many options now especially, with the lines of communication and travel networking the whole world together, to go somewhere new, start over, see beautiful things. So while misery is prevalent all throughout the human spectrum and while it will never go away – we can get over it. But what if you just can’t? Some people just fall through the cracks and become lost to any help or hope of recovering. These are the clinically depressed and the drinkers and – here’s your tie-in to the music I’m reviewing – drug addicts.

Yes, Alice in Chains was a band about inner turmoil and depression. Their first two albums were classics, albeit with a few fillers here and there and they never quite hit perfection. As many rock stars of the 80s and 90s did, the band became entwined with substance abuse, most notably here in the case of Layne Staley, who as we all know, OD’d in 2002 on heroin and cocaine. This is their self-titled album and the last album Staley ever appeared on with them, and frankly, the cracks were beginning to show. This was a broken band.

But that’s part of why this is so perfect. See, the thing with Alice in Chains is, they always had a knack for writing killer hooks and groovy, bluesy rock n’ roll riffs. Sometimes they even got pretty Sabbathine-heavy, and about half of their material could be termed somewhere close to heavy metal. But that wasn’t what they were truly great at; that was never their true talent. What Alice in Chains were good at was crafting masterful, soul-bleeding evocations of sadness and sorrow. On some tracks, like “Love, Hate, Love” and “Down in a Hole” off previous albums, they nearly perfected that; but on this self-titled album, they finally mastered their art.

This is one of the most broken-down, disharmonious depictions of wretched misery ever put to record. And it’s because Staley really was on the end of his rope here. You can hear it in every vocal line he sings. His voice, previously a loud, crowing holler, has been reduced here to a reedy monotone, the drugs and hard lifestyle having worn him down to a husk. The band has to layer over him like half a dozen times to even make his voice audible over the rest of the music. And while some people will tell you that he’s not as good on here, that he’s one of the factors that holds this album back…I think it really works. While his voice is so much less expressive and his range has diminished to almost nothing here, the pure decrepit sorrow is just so evident that it pretty much fits what the band was going for. With Alice in Chains’ themes of self-loathing, of questioning American societal values and the way people treat one another, and of mental deterioration, what better narrator is there than Staley’s droning, half-dead voice? It’s great, and captures exactly what they were trying to convey. When he moans through the eerie chorus of “Brush Away,” or the eight-minute crawl “Frogs,” you will know that nobody else, even Staley himself in the past, could have made these songs work as well as they do here, with that drug-addled, decaying whine as the sole guide through the muck.

The rest of the instruments follow suit, with Jerry Cantrell’s blues-rock-inspired guitar taking on a very organic and emotive form as opposed to the more traditional riffing on previous works, and the rhythms of Sean Kinney and Mike Inez rolling along like a pick-up truck on its last sputtering, choking legs of life. While this was a Seattle-based band, the sound here and atmosphere really call up an old Southern gothic style; very seedy, evoking wide, empty fields with a windmill and a broken down barn in the distance, the sky hanging low with clouds the color of wheat. The riffs are heavy and the leads are just pure whiskey-soaked, smoky goodness – calling back to the band’s bluesiest, grungiest influences. On “Grind,” they lay down a monster riff; on “Sludge Factory” we get some of their best guitar licks yet – pure slow, juicy Southern-cooked goodness. “Head Creeps” is one of their most malicious, oppressive pieces, just a masterpiece of eerie schizophrenia, and “Again” has a killer main riff and a hooky chorus to boot. Dirges like “Shame in You” and “Nothin’ Song” form hypnotic, droning overtures that will just leave you worn out and depressed. Since that’s exactly what the band wants, I think they succeeded wholeheartedly.

The best song here has to be the sole outlier, “Heaven Beside You.” This one, unlike the others, is more focused on the vocals than the guitars, and has a gentle acoustic motif running throughout, with a mesmeric, cathartic Cantrell-sung chorus. The lyrics are a great ode to acceptance of depression and a willingness to try and get better. The narrator of the song realizes that he’s hit bottom, and accepts it, refusing to simply wallow in depression over it and vowing to try to come back from the edge. It’s a soothing trip and a welcome break from the rest of the album’s near-constant insanity and decay. Along with closer “Over Now,” which I will discuss shortly, the slight break in the abject misery of the rest of the album is necessary, and adds depth and dimensions to the whole affair.

This whole thing has a very “personal” air to it, so while I can talk all I want about the mechanical factors that make up its composition, really the focus of Alice in Chains is the soulful emotions and the meanings of the music here. This album is constantly teetering on the edge of a breakdown, and at several points, really does dig down deep into one. The lyrics, while ambiguous, do well with the music to further this vision. Every song is about the limits of human sanity and tolerance, and what happens when we’re pushed to the edge. It’s a very dark, haunted trip and nothing is ever truly spelled out for us, rather just talked about in very vague, poetic ways that serve more as a portrait of someone’s deteriorating mind rather than actually telling a contained story in each track. There’s something nightmareish and diseased about the tone and lyrics on this album, and the band really wants the listener to share those feelings. As the album goes on, the lyrics become less and less well developed – while they are uniformly vague, the ones in the early songs are at least coherent enough. But by the time you hit “Nothin’ Song”…

Began this take at 7:38
Head hit the board enough that it aches
Wonder should I be working so late
Began this take at 7:38
Head hit the board, enough that it aches
Wonder should I be working so late
Wonder should I be working so late
Began this take at 7:38
Head hit the board, enough that it aches
Wonder should I be working so late
Wonder should I be working so late

…yeah, pretty much babbling at this point. Just like, say, a drug addict, spiraling downwards into pre-infant mentality, barely able to form a coherent thought at all. The following song, “Frogs,” features barely any lyrics at all, with much of the vocals just moaning “Why’s it have to be this way?” over and over again. Tragic and affecting in its patheticness – the narrator tries to hold onto the last bits of sanity still clinging to his brain. The crest of the narrator’s decline comes full circle. And closer “Over Now” is a release from pain, a final catharsis after sinking deeper and deeper into the bowels of the other songs’ despair. We do, indeed, pay our debt sometime – and for all this album’s woes and gloom, I think Staley did pay his in the end, as this is a musical masterpiece, a classic of the highest order.

Like I said in the opening paragraph, sometimes people are just broken; sometimes they can’t come back from tragedy and degradation. The wonders of our accomplishments as a species are numerous, but sometimes we fall and we fall hard. Alice in Chains is a perfect, focused, wholly unified vision of exactly that concept, and every song adds to the vision of pure bleak depression. This is music that’s really about something – everything about it, from the vocals to the musicianship to the lyrics, adds to the overall effect, and Cantrell and co. really had something to say about depression and drugs and how far a person can be mentally and physically pushed. What I like about it is that it never focuses on why the narrator is where he is – there’s no sob stories about bad childhoods or the origins of turmoil and ruin. This is just about the here and now, about the last few hours of light in a dying mind, and the deranged, mean-spirited and incoherent thoughts that come with it.

Frankly, I’ve never seen an album so complete and total in its uncleanness, in its filthiness and its vision, and that’s why it gets the big 100%. It is a perfect portrayal of despondent, half-insane melancholy. Alice in Chains is not for everyone, and especially not if you really don’t want to depress yourself, but for the woebegone and the strung-out, this is your song. Your voice in the night – your light in the dark.