Would? Too

M.J. Fine Does It Again: Alice in Chains

by M.J. Fine

If Neil Young's right, and every junkie's like a setting sun, then Layne Staley hovered just above the horizon for longer than anyone expected. Alice in Chains' original singer spent the last several years of his life popping up just often enough to surprise those who thought he'd died, whether to contribute a rare cameo vocal or to grant a paranoid interview about death's certainty. In the end, people stopped expecting even that; by the time anyone noticed he was missing — in April 2002 — he'd been dead for two weeks, in his own apartment, where no one else had any reason to go.

It'd been six years since Alice in Chains had released an album; it's taken the surviving members seven more to make Black Gives Way to Blue, with William DuVall taking the mic. Chalk up the relatively smooth transition to guitarist Jerry Cantrell, who takes solo songwriting credit for nine of the disc's 11 songs. "All Secrets Known" is a classy opener, acknowledging the obvious: "There's no going back to the place we started from." Another highlight, "Your Decision," is a subtle expression of survivors' pain with poignant interplay of acoustic and electric textures. That careful balance of vulnerability and aggression is key to the AIC sound and, accordingly, the set suffers only when things edge too far into metal, as on "Last of My Kind" and the second half of "Acid Bubble."

The band's biggest album, Dirt, perfectly embodies its time, place, genre and drug of choice. (Early '90s, Seattle, grunge and heroin, in case you snoozed through Singles.) Drugs aren't the subject of every last song, but they're certainly the subtext. Listening to the songs Staley had a hand in is a trip through emotional terrain that's rough but remarkably lucid as he cycles through rationalization ("Junkhead,"), self-loathing ("Dirt"), paranoia ("God Smack") and self-medication ("Hate to Feel"). Those who aren't addicts may respond to Staley's needy voice or Cantrell's urgent riffs, but they'll find it harder to relate to the junkie logic.

If Staley had hung around, in the world but not of it, Alice in Chains wouldn't have gotten the chance to rise again. That must weigh on Cantrell and his bandmates, but it's really healthier this way.

(m_fine@citypaper.net)