September 2022 Feature Release - The Gateway Edition

So just like that we find that a new month is upon us which of course means that we’ll be nominating a brand new monthly feature release for each clan. This essentially means that we’re asking you to rate, review & discuss our chosen features for no other reason than because we enjoy the process & banter. We’re really looking forward to hearing your thoughts on our chosen releases so don’t be shy.

September 2022 is a special month and year for the Gateway, as it marks 30 years since the release of one of my favourite albums of all time. The pinnacle of the early 90s grunge movement: Alice in Chains' Dirt.

https://metal.academy/releases/142

Top 50 metal albums for me, and one of the first full metal albums I explored thanks to a long-lasting grunge buzz.

This is not only a wonderful example of the grunge & alternative metal subgenres but it's a marvelous release for music in general. In fact, I completely agree with Saxy's statement that "Dirt" is the best release to come out of the grunge movement. A lot of people tend to froth other AIC's acoustic releases & I don't mind them but for me Alice in Chains are at their best when they're playing doomy Sabbath dirges with those wonderfully drug-laden Cantrell-led vocal harmonies layered over the top & "Dirt" has those things going on in spades. There's no sign of weakness here. It's just wall to wall belters which sees "Dirt" currently sitting at number 13 on my all-time metal releases list (number 1 for alternative metal) & that's not likely to change any time soon.

5/5

P.S. I'm actually wearing my Alice in Chains "Rooster" t-shirt right now actually.

I must admit that I am exceedingly reluctant to share my thoughts on AiC's seminal Dirt album as it seems to be one of those untouchable records that everyone adores, yet for some reason I just don't feel it. I had never listened to Alice in Chains much, at least until we had The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here as a monthly feature for July last year. Now, I really enjoyed that album and started to think that maybe I'd missed out on something with AiC, but now that I've checked out Dirt properly I don't think so at all. 

The problem isn't an aversion to grunge, I was quite heavily into it back in the day and I still love me some Soundgarden, Nirvana, early Pearl Jam and even Hole and Silverchair, to this day, but Dirt just doesn't cut it for me compared to Superunknown, Nevermind or Ten. My biggest confession is that the reason for this is mainly that I don't like Layne Staley's singing. I much prefer Will Duvall's vocals as he tries less to dominate things and just sounds more natural to me. Staley's style seems overwrought and just too theatrical, as he plays up to the troubled genius persona, for my taste.

Musically I must admit that the band sound great, but their heavy leaning towards a blues sound does make me scratch my head at why these guys are never challenged as to their metal credentials when others are often scrutinised for playing rock-adjacent metal. Now don' t get me wrong, there are some good songs here, but they are the more well-known ones which are such for good reason, but many just feel like metallised verions of old Cream or Led Zeppelin numbers.

I'm sure you will all be queueing up to tell me how clueless I am but, quite frankly, you're probably best saving your breath (or at least your typing fingers) because it is what it is.

3.5/5

I have to confess to liking Dirt a lot less nowadays than I did some thirty years ago when I first heard it. Back then it was a mainstay of my listening rotation as I was genuinely enamoured with the riffs of Jerry Cantrell and his bluesy lead work. The vibrant and electric sounds of the first two tracks on Dirt do still resonate with me to this day as a perfect start to an album as they typified the fact that not all grunge had to be gloomy and melancholic. There was an immediacy back then to the opening of this record that was not often repeatable on most other releases of the time. This spontaneous and perfectly tight sounding start is actually only rivalled upon reflection by the end of the record when the tumultuous Angry Chair, followed by the initially sultry and brooding Would? (that develops into a pounding album closer over its three-and-a-half-minute run time) close out the release brilliantly.

The problem I have with Dirt is what comes between these tracks as I now find the album to have lost a lot of the overall positivity that I held for it back in the day. Arguably the more grungey aspects of the album are the ones that I now dislike the most as with the exception of Down In A Hole and Rooster I no longer enjoy the rest of Dirt. Rain When I Die now sounds as whiny as the title suggests it should, only not in a cool reflective way like it used to and I just cannot stand Sickman anymore with its chaotic and too frantic structure. It is not rare for me to find an AIC album that is frontloaded (although rarer in fact to find any album that is front and rear-loaded to such a small extent) as Facelift takes a huge dip south after the opening two tracks, so there is a consistency to their early output for me. This is not to say that they are not still hugely important to the alternative metal movement - parking grunge references to one side for a moment - as AIC were really good at incorporating other influences into their vaguely metal-like foundations in order to offer something which was the core essence of alternative music.

I just do not feel that Dirt has aged that well for me, even acknowledging the nostalgia around the release and the importance of it. I will openly acknowledge that they have never topped this release in either era of the band but the longevity of it is questionable nowadays even though there is still enough here to keep this a four star rating.

4/5

I have to admit that Layne's vocals on "Dirt" sit amongst my favourite in all of metal & I regard almost every track to be a genuine metal classic with the exception of the two-track run that contains "Godsmack" & the short interlude "Iron Gland". Some of the less acclaimed tracks like "Dirt" & "Junkhead" absolutely slaughter me. I was a total extreme metal nut at the time of "Dirt"s release but I got onboard very early on in the piece & have my first real girlfriend to thank for making sure I gave records like this one the attention they deserved. You know what though? That slut left me for a dude that we used to hang out with after we'd been together for a year so my nostalgia can relate to the depressive nature of Layne's performance here.

Okay, looking at the early returns provided me with a very different reaction that what I was expecting. A lot of the reviews from those who frequent heavier clans (such as The Horde and The North) respect this album for what it is, but do not like it nearly as much as our last fauré into Alice in Chains last year with The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here. 

Upon further analysis, I might see why this is the case. For starters, Layne Stayley era AiC were engulfed in the grunge boom from the pacific northwest. And perhaps there was a little bit of an incentive to make something different than Nirvana, but just as accessible. The end result is an album that sounds more emotionally driven than Nevermind, but heavier than Ten. And to anyone who knows ANYTHING about doom metal will typically gravitate towards the heavier, and less melodically driven side of the genre, instead of this squeaky clean version of it.

But as a wee lad back in the late 1990s, who never liked the adult contemporary gunk that was played in my family household at the time, I wanted something bigger. Nothing too extraordinary, but certainly outside of the realms of the family comfort zone. And grunge was that thing. Furthermore, Alice in Chains was my introduction to metal as a whole. Perhaps counterintuitively, it was the melodic songwriting from the adult contemporary slosh used over a heavy metal idiom that hooked me and never let go. 

Without rambling, my experience with Dirt is in direct opposition to Sonny's. As I matured, it was albums like Nevermind and Ten that lost favour as I learned more about the artist, their songwriting process, as well as their future. Sure, Alice in Chains had their problems on later albums (S/T and Black Gives Way To Blue) and left me questioning the bands future, but I never found those albums outright repulsive in the same way I find so many newer Pearl Jam records in the 2000s and beyond. Dirt is an album with soul; something severely lacking in the genres that Alice in Chains are attempting to replicate here. And it's the soul of Layne Stayley, Jerry Cantrell, and the rest of Alice in Chains that lives on 30 years later.

9/10

Without rambling, my experience with Dirt is in direct opposition to Sonny's. As I matured, it was albums like Nevermind and Ten that lost favour as I learned more about the artist, their songwriting process, as well as their future. Sure, Alice in Chains had their problems on later albums (S/T and Black Gives Way To Blue) and left me questioning the bands future, but I never found those albums outright repulsive in the same way I find so many newer Pearl Jam records in the 2000s and beyond. Dirt is an album with soul; something severely lacking in the genres that Alice in Chains are attempting to replicate here. And it's the soul of Layne Stayley, Jerry Cantrell, and the rest of Alice in Chains that lives on 30 years later.

Just for the record, Saxy, I don't have any experience or history with Dirt as I only listened to it just now for the first time for the feature, so I don't really know what you mean. Maybe that is the difference you are referring to as I have zero emotional attachment to it as it played no part in forming or shaping my taste in music, whereas Nevermind, Ten and Superunknown did? I had been a metal fan for many years before Dirt was released and had even left metal behind by then, at least for a while, before returning to it later in the nineties. I do agree about Pearl Jam though, as pretty much everything after Vitalogy is painful.