While bands like Nirvana were becoming more accessible on Nevermind, and Pearl Jam were releasing Ten, Alice in Chains were traversing the pits. Unlike the other grunge bands of the 90s, Alice in Chains were not afraid of the slower, brooding song styles.
Hearing Dirt by Alice in Chains must have been a similar feeling for me to how those who experienced the first Black Sabbath album must have felt.Īnd that comparison is not devoid of context. And it does it all with a level of comfort that is among one of my favourite heavy metal records. This record is dark, gloomy, depressive, nihilistic and sombre. I bring all of this up as preamble because you need to know exactly why Alice in Chains’ Dirt is the pinnacle of the grunge era. Say what you will about the over compressed mess that is In Utero, but it has some of Nirvana’s most essential tracks, not to mention their dark undertones. To this day, I hold Nevermind as one of the most overrated albums of all time, right alongside the entirety of AC/DC’s discography. Everyone loved Nirvana when I was an adolescent, but I always found their music so squeaky clean and commercialized and lacked a lot of substance. So, when I gave my parents a more than reasonable excuse to listen to anything with a rock edge, and they refused, well then it became obvious where much of my attention to alternative counterculture derived from. I’m sure my story is not that dissimilar to many others, but I grew up in a household that was dominated by soft adult contemporary music and pop adjacent music of the 90s boy bands. And so here is the mention: I never liked Nirvana in the same way as those other grunge bands. Of course, one would be remised if they didn’t mention Nirvana. I don’t need to elaborate further but just the names: Peral Jam, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees are legendary.
While the mid 2000s were brim with the early stages of scene emo culture with pop punk from My Chemical Romance and a resurgent Green Day, my local alternative radio station (it still does) had a metaphorical boner for the early 90s and more importantly, the grunge era. How does one discover metal in the modern day? I think in some regards, heavy metal is more elitist than some of us could even imagine even ten years ago with how wild some of it can get.
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