Three 65, Day 5
Alice In Chains, Dirt

Simply put, Dirt is the best and most harrowing musical statement about heroin addiction ever recorded. It's also one of the finest metal albums ever put to wax, and one of the best records released in the 1990s.

Alice In Chains started out as a kind of threatening glam-metal band, and when Nirvana and Pearl Jam put Seattle on the map, attention soon focused on them as progenitors of the so-called "grunge" sound. But that isn't entirely accurate; they were never a grunge band (neither were Pearl Jam or Nirvana, for that matter), they were a metal band. Their first album, Facelift, is as metal as it gets, especially towards its second half.

For the follow-up, Alice In Chains went into the studio with producer Dave Jerden, best known for making Jane's Addiction sound larger than Godzilla. The move was a good one, and they came out with thirteen songs that sum up the misery, remorse, pain, and anguish of heroin addiction better than anyone not named Cobain ever has.

The album starts out with two hard rock numbers: "Them Bones" and "Dam That River," both of which ponder mortality and hopelessness. From there, the album sinks into a true kind of hell, as the protagonist suffers from depression ("Down In A Hole"), self-hatred (the title track), and fury (the awesome "Angry Chair," whose opening drums make the oncoming song sound like an approaching thunderstorm). The only relief from these themes comes in the form of a reminiscence about the protagonist's father (the Vietnam ballad "Rooster") and the closing track, a brief song about returns and healing called "Would?"

The overall band is good on this album, but the real kudos go to vocalist Layne Staley and guitarist/band-head-honcho Jerry Cantrell. Staley has a yowl that could shatter glass, and it's perfectly suited to this kind of material. Cantrell, who also contributes vocals and wrote much of the material, wrests sounds out of his guitar that makes it sound like the walls are melting.

Unfortunately, time and drugs would destroy this line-up of Alice In Chains. Layne Staley and Mike Starr both died of overdoses, proving that the band walked the walk as well as they talked the talk. Cantrell pushed on recently with the decent Black Gives Way To Blue, but without Staley to provide that blood-curdling shriek, it just isn't the same.