Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Artist: Mad Season
Label: Columbia Records
Released: 2013
Runtime: 1:19:14 + 1:14:52
Rating: 4.8/5
Grunge – is it just a buzzword that tells you nothing about the palette of sounds hiding behind the label, or can we talk about a historical fact that defined the nineties, my generation, and above all, since Hendrix, carried the voice of a city out into the world once again, a city where it rains 90 percent of the year and the rest of the days the sky is laced with heavy leaden clouds of gray, hopelessness, depression and narcotic paralysis? Either way – it was Seattle, with its invasion of checkered patterns on flannel shirts and a sea of talented local addicts with a brilliant feel for making music, that gave meaning to my unfocused teenage life in the nineties, and the lion’s share of that army of saviors was made up of bands like Pearl Jam, Screaming Trees, Alice In Chains, not to mention the top-leaguers Nirvana and Soundgarden. Drugs were both a temptation and a burden, and because of them, a few decades on, we’ve been robbed of plenty of musical brilliance, and above all of the soul of what those martyrs might have gone on to do, and of toxically fertile poets who are no longer among us. So let’s stay with chained Alice. It’s the charismatic, depressive frontman Layne Staley, soaked in drugs and darkness, whom we can rightly regard as the true voice and face of Alice In Chains and also as one of the loudest and noblest heralds of his generation; with his hybrid of the freshly invented Seattle sound and metal he drove the train of musical pleasure in an always slightly different, less mainstream direction, which is why he gets his due this time, with the reissue of his excursion into the unknown alongside an alliance of outstanding star names under one roof, the band Mad Season.
The story really begins when Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready ran into a kindred spirit in Walkabouts bassist John Baker Saunders at a rehab center for addictive substances. The two formed a band and invited, among others, Staley, who was sinking ever deeper into addiction and whom his friends wanted to help, through music, find the path to the light of recovery, cleansing and, above all, survival. Screaming Trees drummer Barrett Martin completed the picture, and after a few gigs under the temporary name Gacy Bunch, the band renamed itself and made its name with a moniker fitting for the times and the band’s soul: Mad Season. A modern-day psychedelia, a monument to the days of magic mushrooms, a blossoming of melodic rapture, got its obelisk of brilliant excellence in 1995, when the album Above came out. Unlike the far more celebrated and oft-cited excursions into the unknown by bands like Temple Of The Dog and Brad, this band broke through onto the airwaves, but after a steep rise came a premature fall, the collapse of the whole setup, Staley’s exit from the band, and then Saunders’ return to the road of self-destruction, which ended his life far too early in 1999. Only three years later, Staley succumbed to the same fatal stupor.
A full eighteen years of adulthood have passed since the record came out, so it’s now possible to judge its quality more objectively and more lucidly, and 18 years on we can get to know it with a rich spectrum of extras. Besides the well-known album, the Deluxe edition of Above serves up a colorful range of live, previously unreleased recordings from the band’s failed rehearsal sessions, a DVD, and a written, documented tribute to an era from a city that will never again be what it was in 1995. Honestly, there’s no need to look for any fake romanticism here. Mad Season were a collection of exceptional musicians trying to carve a path into some new shared reality and leave a mark that could stay unforgotten. Barrett Martin described the recipe for the sound with fitting words, equating Mad Season with a blues experiment. That’s hardly surprising, since Saunders had helped build the blues scene in windy Chicago and in Minneapolis, but I still can’t fully agree with a dry blues vocabulary when it comes to Mad Season. There’s plenty of atmospheric grunge sound, but instead of sharp, metallized lines, its genetic code this time includes much more relaxed lounge atmospheres. If you like, it’s the perfect road trip, totally unburdened by stopwatch concerns, and the heart-spilled passion and beautiful sound often stretch past an epic six minutes, yet there’s no boredom on the record.
The music reflects the characters of everyone present, and if in their »day jobs« in their home bands they had succumbed to the more metallized charms of punk-tinged grunge, this time what comes to the fore is a deeper soaking in rock classics like Led Zeppelin and the more contemplative Black Sabbath, and in the smoky atmosphere of Above something more jazzy, relaxed and improvisationally free works its way into the story. The wake-up call of the increasingly sensual Wake Up proves that McCready’s Stratocaster is a truly venomous complement to Layne’s dreamy gloom, and as a gorgeous filler, besides bass and drums, the xylophone sounds of the basic four chords drop into the structure of the track. The allusion to Planet Caravan morphs with X-Ray Mind into a more explosive continuation of psychedelic distortions. McCready’s guitar dominates every song, and the equal counterweight to the sweet guitar tones is mostly Staley’s dark poetry of self-destructive resolve. »See the more I think / I’m afraid to blink / I don’t move an inch / Slowly draining me / Hire a spy and bug me / Pimp your friends for money / Rich and growing sicker / Sell the dead ones quicker,« sings Layne, and the layers of rich sound show that Mad Season as a whole were a very balanced mix of inspired, beautifully matched and nobly tempered musicians. The lead single from the debut, River Of Deceit, stays true to the pain and to the recipe of just-sweet-enough grunge. »My pain is self-chosen, at least so The Prophet says / I could either burn or cut off my pride and buy some time / A head full of lies is the weight, tied to my waist,« Layne confesses over and over, and this time the hit-ready lyrics could, with every chord, find their way onto the radio stations dictated by commercial sound as well.
The deception is perfect, and the meditative foundation of the album is at once so simple and seemingly fragile that it’s only after landing on the harder sounds of I’m Above that you realize this is a well-thought-out rock product. Screaming Trees creep out of the speakers with the help of Mark Lanegan’s gorgeous baritone, which complements Staley’s mournful coloring in royal fashion. The punch of the Led Zeppelin-style chorus is softened by the guitar-laced ease of the acoustics, and Mad Season don’t give full flight to all their magnetically attractive demons. There’s a lot of restraint and reserve, and precisely because of that, Mad Season got only a pittance of the praise in 1995 that they could easily have earned for the work they did. A huge amount of effort is woven into the whole, but you can’t credit the record with total disconnection and 100% fun. Neither the excellent bluesy Artificial Red helps with that, nor the more exponentially thunderous distortion of the dark Lifeless Dead, which sings out the junkie hopelessness of heroin addiction. The zombie parade continues with the more Alice In Chains-style I Don’t Know Anything, which then drops schizophrenically onto the more Lanegan-darkened acoustics of Long Gone Day, where Skerik’s toxic saxophone and deep, droning cello sneak into the mix, and Mad Season once again give themselves over to more relaxed jazzy moments with a narrative totally different from their home bands.
The combination of Pearl Jam sensuality, Screaming Trees menace, Alice In Chains sharpness and attitude, and the bluesy persona of the Lamont Cranston Band is something truly extraordinary and never repeated later, and the first disc doesn’t end with the closing acts of the original studio offerings, such as the psychotic brilliance of the instrumental November Hotel and All Alone. There are quite a few extras, despite Staley’s absence. After the acoustic interlude of Interlude, Mad Season prove in 1997 that they could still exist with the dirty meter of Locomotive, on which Lanegan takes over all the vocal duties but can’t match Staley’s dirty beauty and stoned introspective obsession with an almost Morrison-esque mysticism of flames, fading and dying. More in tune with the older songs is the fragmented beauty of Black Book Of Fear, but Lanegan can’t get out of his Screaming Trees shoes, and Mad Season this time sound much closer to country than to the old-school rock levitations of an everyday-shrugging, more laid-back high. Slip Away tries to chase scraps of old rainbows, but apart from the sonic moments, as the name suggests, there’s little essence left in the palms on which a further success story could be built. There’s also the reminder that at the height of their powers Mad Season dedicated the song I Don’t Wanna Be A Soldier to working-class hero John Lennon (by the way, that track beautifully adorned the compilation album Working Class Hero with Staley’s take on the anti-war meditation by the main driver of the idea and sound of The Beatles), and you’ll no doubt also remember the sexy sax line, which once again brings a bit of brass underpinning to the rather monotonous repetitiveness of the same chords and already-heard patterns.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8-VEQuNeHM
That there’s a lot of good in this band is proven even more by the live recordings of their gig at Seattle’s Moore Theater than by the studio output. What sounded tamed on the album got full stage release and discharge at the documented concert of April 29, 1995. The sound is hellish, and the opening Wake Up throws open every register of the band’s creativity and dreaminess. All the barriers are gone, and Mad Season function solidly and unbreakably. The crushing darkness carries on nicely with Lifeless Dead, which becomes a screen for a more merciless run through the elements, and the outstanding rhythm section complements the vocal-guitar duels beautifully. Proof that chemistry can’t be created in a lab and then recreated on stage (Mad Season had trouble precisely with empirically proving their genius in the laboratory-sterile environment of the studio, by the way, but on stage, apparently not…). The artificial blush of Artificial Red brings a bit more of a bluesy nature into the set, while River Of Deceit works even more balanced and resonant on stage than on the album. One of the unexpected highlights of the April show was also Lennon’s revolt against the military with I Don’t Wanna Be A Soldier, nicely spiced up by the excellent Skerik. The bombastic punch of bass, drums, distorted guitars and Staley’s fuck-off to dying for your country is topped off by a gorgeous saxophone, which doesn’t get much space in Mad Season’s vocabulary, but wherever it shows up, it hits all the harder and cuts all the deeper. Everything works unforced, relaxed, liberating, and the season of madness continues with Lanegan’s ode to a day long gone in Long Gone Day. The title track I’m Above testifies that Mad Season were rightly one of the brightest moments of the nineties, and grunge will never again see a repeat of what was created back then. The quality level holds up with I Don’t Know Anything and the radiation-fated X-Ray Mind, and after the echoes of the meditative All Alone, the set closes beautifully with a full 14-minute meditation of November Hotel. You can hear that on their mission to conquer the musical world, Mad Season managed, at least for a moment, to have fun and spread their enthusiasm among the crowd too.
I’m truly sorry I wasn’t there myself at this ritual back in 1995 in that sonic sanctuary of Seattle, but as consolation, the Deluxe version offers one last visit backstage with the band on the closing third part of this holy triptych of Mad Season – the DVD with the complete visual document of the Moore Theater concert, from the sonic barrage you’ve just heard and fully enjoyed, and on top of that there are sweet extras from their very last joint stage performance on New Year’s Eve 1995 at the RCKNDY, footage from the radio appearance on Self Pollution, and, of course, the band’s only official video, for River Of Deceit. What stays with you most is the outstanding November Hotel, where McCready gets carried away with an epic solo and a fully lived-in drop of the toxic Stratocaster behind his neck, and the sweaty faces of everyone involved show that these men knew what they were doing, and for the perfect sonic derivative of the heart’s essence sacrificed all their potency and charisma, gave up the pose and the safe shelter of guaranteed success in their home bands, and above all surrendered to music’s true primal call. The documented beauty has been nicely reworked this time under the directing baton of Duncan Sharp, and despite the eighteen-year gap, the backstage visit is perhaps even better and more lasting than if I had stood in front of the band myself in that fateful year of 1995.
I think the objections of purists, would-be critics and charlatans, who in 1995 dumped a ton of manure on the exceptional musical oratorios of an era that was so damn important, yet so cramped by the mere buzzword grunge, which says damn little about the music and the breadth of cosmic influence of the true forefathers of alternative rock, count for damn little now, eighteen years later. Mad Season have got their memorial, their monument, their marker of greatness with this special, truly lovely whole of sound, soul and image, finally and permanently set in place in this prestigious collection. What might have been doesn’t even matter. Alongside the legends of destructiveness at the very core of the nineties, of people who undoubtedly left a mark both on time and on those of us who listened not just to the sound but also to the messages, warnings, guidance and wake-up calls, something unique is now available. Above in this form is an extraordinary time machine, a document of an era and a wonderful chain of coincidences from which something great and exceptional was born, even if back then we maybe didn’t know how to appreciate it. Like a spell and a beautiful offering, now that we’re eighteen years older and wiser, it comes back as a chance to give Mad Season our recognition, with at least a fleeting escape far away from this crazy world, from the current seasons of madness, at least today – those long eighteen years later. And fully deserved, my friends!
Lineup
Barrett Martin – drums, percussion, double bass, cello, marimba, vibraphone
Mike McCready – electric and acoustic guitar
John Baker Saunders – bass
Layne Staley – vocals, rhythm guitar
Guest musicians:
Mark Lanegan – vocals on I’m Above, Long Gone Day, Locomotive, Black Book Of Fear and Slip Away
Skerik (Nalgas Sin Carne) – saxophone
Production
Mad Season & Brett Eliason
Tracklist
CD 1: Above + Bonus Tracks
1. Wake Up
2. X-Ray Mind
3. River of Deceit
4. I’m Above
5. Artificial Red
6. Lifeless Dead
7. I Don’t Know Anything
8. Long Gone Day
9. November Hotel
10. All Alone
Bonus tracks:
11. Interlude
12. Locomotive
13. Black Book Of Fear
14. Slip Away
15. I Don’t Wanna Be a Soldier
CD 2: Live at the Moore
1. Wake Up
2. Lifeless Dead
3. Artificial Red
4. River Of Deceit
5. I Don’t Wanna Be A Soldier
6. Long Gone Day
7. I’m Above
8. I Don’t Know Anything
9. X-Ray Mind
10. All Alone
11. November Hotel
DVD: Live at the Moore plus bonus footage
1. Lifeless Dead (Live at The Moore)
2. River Of Deceit (Live at The Moore)
3. Long Gone Day (Live at The Moore)
4. I Don’t Know Anything (Live at The Moore)
5. X-Ray Mind (Live at The Moore)
6. All Alone (Live at The Moore)
7. November Hotel (Live at The Moore)
8. Wake Up (Unseen Footage from The Moore)
9. Artificial Red (Unseen Footage from The Moore)
10. I Don’t Wanna Be A Soldier (Unseen Footage from The Moore)
11. I’m Above (Unseen Footage from The Moore)
12. Wake Up (Live at The RCKNDY -NYE Show 1995)
13. Lifeless Dead (Live at The RCKNDY -NYE Show 1995)
14. River Of Deceit (Live at The RCKNDY -NYE Show 1995)
15. I Don’t Know Anything (Live at The RCKNDY -NYE Show 1995)
16. I’m Above (Live at The RCKNDY -NYE Show 1995)
17. Artificial Red (Live at The RCKNDY -NYE Show 1995)
18. I Don’t Wanna Be A Soldier (Live at The RCKNDY -NYE Show 1995)
19. All Alone (Live at The RCKNDY -NYE Show 1995)
20. November Hotel (Live at The RCKNDY -NYE Show 1995)
21. Lifeless Dead (Self Pollution Radio Broadcast)
22. I Don’t Know Anything (Self Pollution Radio Broadcast (new edit))
23. River Of Deceit (Music Video)
