Format: CD Condition: New Year of Release: 1992 Cat. No.: 52475 Label: Sony/Columbia
Dirt is Alice in Chains' major artistic statement and the closest they ever came to recording a flat-out masterpiece.
It's a primal, sickening howl from the depths of Layne Staley's heroin addiction, and one of the most harrowing concept albums ever recorded. Not every song on Dirt is explicitly about heroin, but Jerry Cantrell's solo-written contributions (nearly half the album) effectively maintain the thematic coherence -- nearly every song is imbued with the morbidity, self-disgust, and/or resignation of a self-aware yet powerless addict.
Cantrell's technically limited but inventive guitar work is by turns explosive, textured, and queasily disorienting, keeping the listener off balance with atonal riffs and off-kilter time signatures. Staley's stark confessional lyrics are similarly effective, and consistently miserable. Sometimes he's just numb and apathetic, totally desensitized to the outside world; sometimes his self-justifications betray a shockingly casual amorality; his moments of self-recognition are permeated by despair and suicidal self-loathing.
Even given its subject matter, Dirt is monstrously bleak, closely resembling the cracked, haunted landscape of its cover art. The album holds out little hope for its protagonists but in the end, it's redeemed by the honesty of its self-revelation and the sharp focus of its music.
~ Steve Huey, All Music Guide
TRACK LISTING:
1 Them Bones 2 Dam That River 3 Rain When I Die 4 Down In A Hole 5 Sickman 6 Rooster 7 Junkhead 8 Dirt 9 God Smack 10 Intro (Dream Sequence) 11 Hate To Feel 12 Angry Chair 13 Would?
