How to Stage a Comeback

Speaking of Alice in Chains, they've announced yet another leg of the tour in support of Black Gives Way to Blue. This time around they've developed a package, tagging Mastodon and the Deftones to come along for the ride and naming the whole thing BlackDiamondSkye after the album each band is supporting. Anyway, looking through dates, I see the New York City show will be in Madison Square Garden and it struck me that if you're planning a comeback, the Alice in Chains model is the way to go:

1. Release a great comeback album that sounds just as good as anything you did back in the day.
2. Tour the shit out of it. Start at Irving Plaza, playing one night for 1,200 people.
3. Come back to New York six months later and play two nights at Terminal 5 for 6,000 people.
4. Come back to New York six months after that and play an arena with one of metal's biggest successes in the last decade on your opening bill.
5. Fun and profit (of course).
   

The Unreality of Alice in Chains' Own Hell

I was listening to "My Own Hell" on the way into work today - and really, for a song about isolation, can there be any better way to listen than with a pair of headphones? - and much like with my post on "Cancer" yesterday, I was struck by the effective use of aural imagery to underscore the problem of feeling alone when surrounded by others. The song achieves this feeling with two techniques: first, the instrumentation suggests someone isolated by a mental wall: the guitar sits up front in the mix, a stream of conscious thought sharpened with reverb, but the other stringed instruments - the bass, the cellos - seem shadowy; the cellos sit far to the right of the mix and the bass floats beneath a secondary layer of fuzz. You can hear both instruments if you dig, but much like someone struggling to engage would feel, they seem half-heard and dreamlike. Second, the minor interval used in the verse vocal harmonies both conveys the stereotypical connotation of minor as "sad" and makes it impossible for the listener to fix on a true vocal melody, heightening the song's feeling of unreality.

The effect is more profound in the verses - the choruses are far more conventional, opting to offer up a sing-along hook instead - but the whole effect is so hypnotic that I can't help but hit repeat every time I listen.

Song Review: Alice in Chains - A Looking in View

I've listened to the new Alice in Chains track a few times now since the band announced yesterday it was available on their website. Alice in Chains has always been a very hit or miss band for me, their inconsistency due, no doubt, to having a partnership built on creative tension where one of the partners was on some pretty serious drugs, but I have felt enough of a connection in the past to give their new incarnation a shot.

The new song, a seven minute track called "A Looking in View" has a lot of the pieces of a Dirt-era track: a heavy, almost doomy riff that would fit in with songs like "Rain When I Die" while evoking some of metal's more recent developments; vocal harmonies that have more than a hint of Layne without completely disguising new vocalist DuVall's more nasal tones; a sense of desperation to the lyrics and the melodies that sharpens to a hook for the chorus. It's a good track, but while listening I find myself wondering it "A Looking in View" would stand out if it didn't have the band's famous name to back it up...until I get to the end of the song. For the last minute and a half or so, the guitar, drums, and bass shamble forward like a dying man one step into the grave and Cantrell and DuVall's voices tune to dissonant harmonies that moan like spirits of the damned, calling the dead man home. It's a ear grabbing dark place that Alice in Chains have only managed to really channel into their music on a few occasions in their career, but if they've found a way to do so consistently on their upcoming album, the results should be extraordinary.

Mustaine and His Cryptic Writings

Seth and I were speculating last night on the "squashing a feud" news that Dave Mustaine hinted at the other day, wondering if it might mean - since the openers are still swirling in rumor and speculation - a spot on the fall Metallica tour or a tour with Slayer. Since Anthrax and Alice in Chains are both active at this point, we thought the later could very well turn into a revisit of Clash of the Titans (pending a suspension of egos, of course). Of course, now I re-read Mustaine's post and see it's a "potential" feud getting put to rest, so the entire speculation might be moot, but what do you all think? Would you want to see either one of these tours happen? Which would you prefer?

I [Heart] Soundgarden...For Historical Reasons

Was breezing through the latest post on the Lefsetz Letter when I spotted a section called "Like Suicide." Since I've loved the word to music association game since high school like a fat kid loves cake, I jumped to the first reference that came to my head: "Like Suicide," the track from Superunknown. Turns out Bob and I were on the same page, because he was writing about the same song, how he'd just heard it for the first time because he'd given up on Soundgarden after Loud Love. How the song struck him like "Rooster," but not quite as strong.

What he said made me laugh for a few reasons. First: When I was in college, a friend of mine from high school IMed me. He was trying to convince his girlfriend at the time to give Alice in Chains another shot by making her a mix and wanted to know what song I thought he should leave out. "Rooster," I said. "It's their weakest song." I'm not sure I'd say the same today - the end of Facelift, for example, falls a little flat on the promise offered by the album's opening tracks - but in a list of favorites by AiC, "Rooster" still wouldn't come out on top.

Second: I bought Superunknown when it came out in 1994; when "Spoonman" and "Black Hole Sun" were in heavy rotation on the local rock radio stations. I was thirteen; I was not particularly sophisticated in my musical tastes. I didn't get the album at all; I remember wanting to skip "Superunknown" and "Head Down" (sacrilege for me; any album in the trial phase of new ownership should never have a track skipped and any album worthy of ownership should not have a track bad enough to need skipping. I have very weird standards when it comes to music) so I could get to the singles and get back to familiar ground.

Flash forward two years later. I start hanging out with that same friend who later asked me for mix CD advice. That friend loves Soundgarden; has all of their albums, comes up with theories about how the band changed after Hiro Yamamoto left, how "Hands All Over" is about arms limitations and "Superunknown" is about the experience of seeing Soundgarden live, thinks "Circle of Power" is one of the purest expressions of the rock 'n roll spirit ever recorded. Crazy, beautiful stuff that makes me dig deeper, see the band in a new light, fall in love with their sounds. I fill out my collection, put "4th of July" on a mix tape because it's the heaviest thing I've heard thus far. After we get our licenses, we drive around singing along to songs like "The Day I Tried to Live," "Fresh Tendrils," "Power Trip," and "Like Suicide," the ultimate bottom-heavy downer of an album closer. Soundgarden's music became an indelible part of my adolescence, so it's a little funny for me to read about someone much older than me discovering them for the first time. How could they miss something that good?