Before the term "grunge" had ever been coined, Alice in Chains were a hit on metal radio, and before a better-known Nirvana mega-hit smashed open the door for these sorts of videos in 1991, their single "Man in the Box" had already managed to sneak its way into MTV rotation. The organic, slow-evolving Seattle scene that birthed the band still holds an almost mythical grip on our musical imaginations. Even as music blogs and ready-made band websites eliminate a lot of the factors that added uniqueness to a band's geographic location, the notion that somewhere out there the "next Seattle" exists is just too exciting. It's similar to how every new prominent GOP figure is the "new Reagan" — it doesn't have to make sense as long as it feels right.
Of grunge's four biggest sellers, Nirvana were the most obvious link to punk. Pearl Jam brought arena rock grandiosity to the style, while Soundgarden, like Alice in Chains, were more metal-minded. But Soundgarden were much more integral to codifying what grunge would eventually sound like, and in hindsight Alice in Chains were something of a liaison between hair and nu metal. As far as the genre-defining angst goes, though, no one else came close. Kurt Cobain tried to complicate his, Eddie Vedder had a tendency to get all hopey changey, and who the fuck knows what Chris Cornell was singing about half the time. Alice in Chains' angst was full-on despair. As child of the '90s, finding oneself "down in a hole" and "feeling so small" because our "wings have been so denied" felt about right.
Dirt is an easy album to look back on fondly, even if it's not an easy album to listen to now. Some menacing entity's coming to "snuff the rooster" made for what we understood as a wartime parable, but taken out of context, some rogue fowl who refuses to die sounds like a precursor to Robot Chicken. And at the time an "angry chair" struck us as this dark, cryptic symbol that perfectly suited our complicated, brooding and misunderstood psyche — making the album a relic of our past, similar to our high school yearbooks. In other words, we still have our copies, but we get embarrassed when other people find them.
Stylistically, the influence of Alice in Chains is all over your radio dial. The playlists for every 102.9 the Buzz in the country is inundated with simple, maximally distorted riffs and one of the band's most enduring legacies: the bro-itone. It's like a baritone, except it'll pick a fight with you and sleep with your girlfriend. Jim Morrison might have been the first rock singer to make the bro-itone his calling card, but Alice in Chains' Layne Staley and Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder made it ubiquitous.
In contemporary rock radio, it's obnoxious posturing, but that wasn't the case for Staley and Vedder. Staley, who unfortunately passed away in 2002 from a drug overdose, had one of the most distinctive and imitated voices of the past two decades. And while you might find fault with his timbre, Vedder's range is unmistakable. For bands like Puddle of Mudd, Days of the New, Tantric, Nickelback and a whole litany of others, you just stick your voice in the back of your throat and cover the few notes you can reach. The bro-itone is for bands for whom screaming isn't always appropriate, but pretty singing never is.
For sure, the bro-itone is a device frequently employed by talentless hacks, but no matter what you think of Alice in Chains' output (including last year's post-Staley return to action Black Gives Way to Blue), you certainly can't call them that.
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