Alice In Chains - Facelift


What a bizarre feeling to hear an album you haven't heard in 30 years. Sure, the big hits from Facelift are fully in my brain out of context, but all the tracks are bathed in an impenetrable fog of pseudo deja vu. I go "oh yeah, i remember this little part," but i totally forgot how G'n'R on quaaludes with out of nowhere funk the album actually is.

If that seems weird to you, you need to remember a few things. 1) Nevermind and the Use Your Illusions haven't come out yet, 2) early Alice In Chains wasn't trying to be different, they were trying to be Mainstream Hard Rock/Heavy Metal and there's more falsetto on Facelift than both Skid Row albums combined, and 3) Grunge is not a genre. 

It sounds like early Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden, and G'n'R, but it's practically New Orleans Sludge slow, and the guitar solos are decidedly more noise than melody. Sludge very much is a genre, it's a grungy offshoot of Black Sabbath style Doom, but the whole kit and kaboodle is Alternative Metal. Just look at the cover. I don't know what that guy snorted, but i bet he wishes he hadn't.

I don't have good memories of this album in its original time frame, but that's not the album's fault, so i keep them double bottled in their own cerebral cyst-prison, but then that makes it a really weird listening experience. I don't have that problem with any subsequent Alice In Chains Album, but i'm afraid Facelift is just always going to sound way slower and way more Hair Metal than i'm expecting. 

It's good though, in that abject misery hangover after a nasty week long 80s bender kind of way; real good contemplating all your poor life choices music, for sure.

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