Alice in Chains - Black Gives Way to Blue Album Review

I had high hopes for this reunion; I really wanted to like this album. William DuVall's a good choice for this group. He's smart enough not to try to mimic Layne Staley and he's got the voice and range to harmonize well with Jerry. The new vocal alchemy does justice to the original magic. The band's overall sound is good, with the reunited AIC members demonstrating that they've still got the chops to deliver that oppressive, sludgy, crunching sonic fusion that became the band's trademark.

The songwriting's another thing entirely.

Too many of Black Gives Way to Blue's songs sound like they were written on autopilot by taking bits and pieces of back catalogue material and haphazardly stitching them together into Frankensongs; dead, shambling mockeries of the real deal. Tunes like Private Hell and Acid Bubble trudge along lethargically for a few minutes, building up to a catharsis that never arrives. Your Decision emulates acoustic hits like No Excuses, but there's no replication of the earlier song's intensity. The only element that carries over is slavish adherence to a twenty year-old formula.

That's not to say that the new incarnation of AIC can't shoot off sparks. Last of My Kind is a bludgeoning powerhouse showing that Cantrell can still deliver dark, majestic solos and it compares favorably with the best songs from Dirt.Lesson Learned is full of heavy goodness with great harmonizing from DuVall and Cantrell. Still, the underlying problem remains - songs that good are too damned few and far between on this record. The promise of something great continually simmers beneath the surface, but the potential is invariably squandered.

AIC was never perfect; they were more than capable of squeezing out a crappy song, but I'd never before gotten the sense that they were coasting. Black Gives Way to Blue sounds anemic compared to any previous AIC or Jerry Cantrell solo album. If you're a hardcore fan, you know you'll pick this up anyway, but try to hold off until it hits the $5.00 used bin. You'll thank me for it. As for the rest of us, we've always got Dirt to remind us of how great this band could be.