Review by Saxy S for Alice in Chains - Black Gives Way to Blue (2009)

Picture this if you will. One of your favourite bands of all time have been disbanded for well over a decade and you know fully well that their will NEVER be a reunion. But then, suddenly, it happens. The band reunites for a new tour as well as a brand spanking new album just to get the juices flowing. Who wouldn't be excited?

That's how I felt in the year 2009 when Alice in Chains release their first studio album in fourteen years; the first to feature William Duvall as the primary vocalist since the passing of legendary former frontman, Layne Stayley (R.I.P.). I wanted this album to be phenomenal. I have made it no secret that Alice in Chains were my first love in heavy metal and Dirt is my favourite of the big four "grunge" albums.

And what we ended up with was... this. I mean it's a respectable album for Alice in Chains and I would have never expected this group to top one of the most influential albums of a generation. But this album suffers hard.

Now part of that has to do with the higher expectations. I have learned over countless disappointments to never place an album in an elite tier before I have even heard a note on it. And while hindsight is always 20/20, I was only eighteen and easily excitable. And for what it is, Black Gives Way to Blue is a more than solid Alice in Chains record. But, like I mentioned with Tool's most recent album, when you have a layoff of this long, just making more of the same stuff as you did before feels underwhelming.

First off, the production on this album is abysmal! Alice in Chains were not the group that needed to get involved in the "loudness wars" of the late 2000s. Their sludge-y brand of alternative metal/grunge was always slow and brooding. If you took songs like "Rooster" and modernized them with this production, the dynamic swells of the verse/chorus combos would have failed to deliver any emotional impact. "A Looking In View" has this problem right from the get go, and their is very little room for reprieve; you better not be listening to this song with headphones because you won't be able to hear yourself think for nearly seven minutes!

And if you go to the ballads, dear god the ballads! This dynamic swell ruins ballads such as "Your Decision", which could have been fantastic, is ruined by a guitar that is louder than Duvall! And any time the drums come in, you can forget it!

Some of my personal favourite moments happen on "Check My Brain", which is a pretty catchy tune, and the first promotional single that I heard. And oh boy I was immediately sold on William Duvall. He has a vocal timbre that is impeccable and very reminiscent of Stayley. While songs like "Last of My Kind" and "Lesson Learned" are dank, brooding pieces where the low end really shines through, even with the blown out mixing.

Now with time, albums like this as well as Metallica's Death Magnetic have been remastered and most people who didn't hear the album back in the day have no idea what I'm talking about! And that's fair. With that said, I have listened to the album again, this time the digital remastering, not my day one CD from HMV. So why do I still feel underwhelmed by this?

Part of that has to do with the songwriting. As mentioned previously, this is the band's first album in over a decade. Part of this may have been the group just trying to get their name out there and remind people that "hey! We're still here!" But from the death of Stayley in 2002, to the first days of recording this album, Cantrell has been away from AiC for six years. Surely over that time, you would think that they would have picked up some new tricks. But they didn't. Instead they released a serviceable record that got people's attention, but were unable to hold that attention into the next decade.

Which is a damn shame because Alice in Chains would redefine their style on their next album, The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here, where Cantrell asserted to us, the fans, that this was no longer Lanye Stayley's Alice in Chains, but William Duvall's. But we will have to save that discussion for another time...