![]() Half of the songs interpreted on Unplugged are some of the band’s darkest and a lot of them deal with Layne Staley’s heroin use or the idea of an ending: Down in a Hole, Angry Chair, Got Me Wrong, Heaven Beside You, Would?, Over Now. Unplugged is perhaps Alice in Chains’ gloomiest album. It’s an album * where the song choice and overall interpretation is more important than the songs played. ![]() The main appeal of Unplugged is to put them on equal footing, played in the same style and atmosphere. What makes them fascinating is that the line between the two isn’t always clear, for that folk informs a lot of their song structures and artistic choices. So, Alice in Chains has always been the story of two bands, right? The doom-influenced heavy metal outfit and the folk rockers. If there’s any lesson to be learned from Alice in Chains’ Unplugged, it’s that they never were a freakin’ grunge band to begin with. It was de facto a funeral for the grunge era and perhaps the least grunge performance from an artist qualified to be grunge. Alice in Chains did that in 1996, one year after releasing what would be their last album with frontman Layne Staley. Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York is arguably the only relevant cultural artifact from this concept, but there is apparently still people ready and willing to pay to listen to their favorite mainstream artists perform acoustic versions of their songs in an intimate setting. Dirt is kind of scattershot, but it has more good songs than bad and several of their biggest hits.MTV Unplugged concerts have been a thing for over thirty years, now. ![]() Their self-titled album has studio versions of Heaven Beside You and Over Now and is a pretty solid album in its own right. It's a weird joke and not really funny, but it's also a very honest moment between friends having a laugh.įurther Listening: Jar Of Flies is the studio almost-an-album where they messed around with writing almost exclusively on acoustic guitars, and it produced two incredible songs: I Stay Away and No Excuses. Bassist Mike Inez played a few bars of Enter Sandman which Staley introduced as an L.L. Metallica were in the audience and had just cut their hair short, so the band poked fun at them. The vocals on the chorus of Heaven Beside You sound out of key, and the guitar solo just doesn't land right. And then there are the little improvisational moments, like Cantrell riffing before they play their last song. It's not captured on the album, but if you watch the DVD of the concert, they stop Sludge Factory and start it over because Staley flubs a lyric. The performance is rough, but there's an honesty to it that I find compelling. Songs like Over Now, Down In A Hole, and Rooster really benefit from this rendering. Hearing these songs rendered acoustically takes away the buzzing vocals and crunching guitars and strips the songs down to their core melodic elements and simple Staley/Cantrell harmonies. Their sound was defined by the way Staley's nasal vocals were layered over top of each other and against Cantrell's throaty baritone. I love Alice In Chains, and part of what I love about this album is that it is part greatest hits collection, part heavy metal deconstruction, and part swan song for Layne Staley. Writer and co-singer Jerry Cantrell would start a successful solo career, and the band would reform with new singer William DuVall in 2006. They would put on their last performance with Staley in July of that year, after which he would disappear into his addiction and eventually die of an overdose in 2002. This performance was recorded in April of 1996. They'd broken up for six months and been plagued by singer Layne Staley's heroin habit. 1995 had seen the release of Alice In Chains, but they didn't do anything else that year. ![]() They hadn't performed in 2 and a half years. Alice In Chains had pretty much run their course when they put on this concert.
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