The older generation always complains that hard rockers are an angry, unstable bunch prone to violent, antisocial and frequently self-destructive behavior. In the case of most good loud bands, they're right. There's an inherent volatility that is key to the appeal of heavy rock. Without this degenerate element, the music loses its impact, becoming little more than the deafening noise our elders suppose it to be. Sometimes the vicarious aspect is there, and the performers look like suicides waiting to happen – as is the case with Alice in Chains. On the band's fourth album, the lyrics deal with drugs, danger and death – and the songs achieve a startling, staggering and palpable impact.
1987 the members of Alice in Chains – Layne Staley (vocals), Jerry Cantrell (guitar), Mike Inez (bass) and Sean Kinney (drums) – have been channeling their aggressive impulses within a forum of dense rhythms and soaring, resentment-riddled vocals. Theirs are songs of the flesh injected with Gothic metal riffs and seamy harmonies that quiver and squirm in an insatiable quest for self-immolation. Yet Alice in Chains aren't truly suicidal. They're like a slashed wrist – stark, bloody and dramatic but more indicative of a cry for help than of a true desire to spiral into the void. Even their most despairing tunes resound with the lust to live, as Staley proclaims in the opening line of the band's third album: "In the darkest hole you'd be well advised/Not to plan my funeral before the body dies."
Like their second album, Dirt, which featured six songs about Staley's battle with heroin, Alice in Chains deals largely with the helplessness and pain of addiction – and not just to drugs. Sure there's "Sludge Factory," in which Staley growls: "Things go well, your eyes dilate, you shake, and I'm high.... Now the body of one soul I adore wants to die." Or the equally desperate "Head Creeps," in which Staley moans: "No more time/Just one more time.... Suck me through a barbed screen." His other songs flow more clearly, gathering around obsessions with fame, relationships and mortality. "Brush Away" asks whether Alice's art is viewed as "a joke? Or latest craze?" In "Over Now," Cantrell muses about surviving a shattered relationship. And "God Am" questions how an omniscient entity could remain passive in the face of cruelty and callousness.
Even though drugs aren't the main lyrical focus, sonically the album resounds with a bleakly disorienting vibe. It sounds like the sinister result of a chemical experiment involving both narcotics and psychedelics. Alice's songs are still dipped in a quagmire of surging guitars and throbbing bass, only this time they're laced with layered, fluorescent licks and soaring vocal harmonies that make a potentially ugly rendering as beautifully horrific and complex as a Hieronymus Bosch painting.
"Grind" shimmers and shudders beneath a web of trippy wah-wah guitar and
Peacock makes pretty folk rock on her major-label debut, but her songs are obscured by awkward pop production that often leaves her sounding like an unpolished Sheryl Crow. Still, Alice Peacock is focused, warm and heartfelt.
RICHARD ABOWITZ
(RS 906 - October 3, 2002)
