Author: Urban Bolta
Artist: Alice In Chains
Label: EMI Records
Release: 2009
Length: 54:10
Rating: 4.5/5
Every music fan gets goosebumps hearing about a band carrying on (or still going) after its main men, its most recognizable members, have already left this world. Boston, Thin Lizzy, Queen… there are quite a few names like that. The same thing happened to the Seattle giants Alice in Chains, and every true grunger wondered why the band would come back when Layne Staley is no longer with us. But boy, did we have to eat our words. Cantrell & co. found an excellent replacement in William DuWall, and together they made an album that not only worthily follows in Staley’s footsteps but, despite all the years separating us from the time when grunge ruled rock’n’roll, captures that true AiC sound.
The Alice in Chains story ended in April 2002, when news shook the music world that frontman and band icon Layne Staley had succumbed to a heroin overdose. AiC hadn’t been active for years by then, and the singer’s death closed the book on this successful band. Three years after the tragedy, the trio from the days of the Alice in Chains album (1995), Cantrell – Inez – Kinney, got back together for the first time, playing a benefit show for the victims of the catastrophic Asian tsunami. Their bond only grew stronger from there. A tour followed, with the little-known William DuWall joining guitarist Cantrell on vocals, and four years after those first signs of life, the new, long-awaited record arrived. Two big questions loomed before its release: how would William DuWall fit in, and what direction would Alice in Chains take in the new century?
Black Gives Way to Blue is a very worthy successor to the earlier AiC releases and could easily wear a 1992 date stamp. You get the band’s unmistakable sound: super slow rhythms and riffs to match, whose crawling pace stirs up a feeling of melancholy and depression in the listener, building the typical groundwork for their own brand of grunge morbidity. AiC have always liked to stress that they started out in the late eighties as a heavy metal band, not a grunge one, and accordingly a heavy metal riff likes to creep into some of the songs, while the acoustic passages of the “Jar of Flies” era are no strangers to them either. They’ve masterfully blended all of that into a mix of eleven songs that will surely leave no existing AiC fan cold. There are plenty of highlights, or to put it another way, the album has no weak moment, which hasn’t always been the case in the past. Your Decision and Private Hell are real treats with an acoustic touch, while Check My Brain and the more intricately built Acid Bubble, which dangerously recall the Facelift days, will land in the hearts of fans of heavier rhythms first. The title track sets a special mood: with famous guest Elton John and his piano, Alice in Chains created what may well be the tenderest song of their career. The album carries a very strong message. In most songs you can spot, sometimes directly and sometimes only between the lines, an obsessive state brought on by the loss of a friend, former vocalist Layne Staley. From the opening lines of All Secrets Known, “Hope, a new beginning, time, time to start living“, all the way to the closing title track, Staley’s ghost is with us, and I’d guess the album is largely dedicated to him.
Jerry Cantrell, an excellent guitarist, has been the main writer of most of the songs from the start, and this time is no different. A fourteen-year break since the last AiC album and two solo records in between didn’t drain the guitarist’s strength or ability. If anything, he clearly kept honing new ideas all along and poured them onto paper. Band members helped shape a few of the songs, and together they delivered an excellent album and set a very high bar for their future work. The newest member, vocalist and rhythm guitarist William DuWall, the biggest point of interest on the record, has settled into his new role brilliantly. It’s obvious he wants to hit as close to his predecessor Staley as possible, and his almost identical vocal timbre serves him very well in this tough and dangerous role, even though his voice only really comes to the fore in certain parts of the songs, since Cantrell’s voice constantly gives him vocal shelter and support. Together they create the recognizable vocal harmony, an Alice in Chains trademark from the beginning, and with the tight, harmonized singing they’ve gone further than ever before.
With this album, Alice in Chains have reached a new stage on their journey. It isn’t just an excellent comeback album; it’s an excellent album, period. Gritty and dark, with acoustic parts woven in as a counterweight, it’s a reminder of why Alice in Chains were once among the finest voices of their era.
Lineup
Jerry Cantrell – vocals, lead guitar
William DuWall – vocals, rhythm guitar
Mike Inez – bass
Sean Kinney – drums
Guest musician:
Elton John – piano on »Black Gives Way to Blue«
Production
Nick Raskulinecz
Tracklist
1. All Secrets Known
2. Check My Brain
3. Last of My Kind
4. Your Decision
5. A Looking in View
6. When the Sun Rose Again
7. Acid Bubble
8. Lesson Learned
9. Take Her Out
10. Private Hell
11. Black Gives Way to Blue
