Dirt is my favorite Alice In Chains record and one of my favorite grunge records because of the creative ways they use melody and vocal harmonies. They use the piling of harmonies between vocals and guitars to add and take away tension throughout the album. Each one of these components of Alice In Chains’ sound is stacked on top of one another. Then there’s the elaborate vocals, sometimes utilizing three or four part harmonies in one song (the guitarist Jerry Cantrell directed his high school’s choir while he was a student). I once read that they almost always play with the guitars tuned a half step down to further add to that widening of sound. Guitar fills up the front end with its distorted reverb heavy sound adding the depth that the melancholy lyrics describe. The drums alone completely fill up the background space of the mix with robust big cymbal sounds and a thick kick drum. Compared to guitar music I hear these days Dirt feels bigger and takes up more space. The width and fullness of the sound immediately struck me when I listened to it again. The production of Dirt really takes a lot from the huge sounds of 1980s hair metal. If sad music tends to make you feel worse when you feel bad I’d recommend not touching Dirt with a ten foot pole.
However I recommend it only if listening to sad music makes you feel better. If the past few months have caused you to feel remotely down, I recommend listening to Dirt. The band tragically lost their charismatic lead singer, Layne Staley in the early 2000s but the band persevered and continued with a new lead singer. They were from Seattle, signed to Columbia, and had almost corny depressing song titles such as “Down In a Hole”, “Rain When I Die”, “Hate To Feel” and “Angry Chair”(that’s just on Dirt). In many ways, Alice In Chains was the archetypal grunge band of the 1990s. Grunge’s association with major labels make it very easy to draw a through line from grunge to nu-metal to some of the crap rock that gets played on the radio these days. I hardly ever heard Alice In Chains talked about through my life after grade five. Grunge feels culturally irrelevant these days. I think it would be accurate to say that in current times, at least in my social circle, grunge music sits in that awkward middle past of music that isn’t really old. The album became a favorite of mine around grade five remembering a phase where my dad blasted the album out of the six disc changer (conveniently located in the trunk) of our 1998 Volkswagen Jetta. On a whim, I decided to revisit listen to the Seattle grunge band Alice In Chains’ sophomore album Dirt from 1992.
However, nothing really seemed to do the trick. Trying to work though some of my negative feelings, I’ve been turning to many of my old musical standbys that have helped me out in the past.
Dirt’s album artwork illustrates some of the humorless honesty evident in the lyrics Staley wrote.Ģ020, has been a challenging year for many of us so far.
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