One of the highlights of Alice In Chains

One could of course argue about whether "Dirt" the best album of Alice In Chains is. In any case, it helped the band out of Seattle in 1992, the final breakthrough, and especially in relation to time and place, the quartet was thrown into the then popular grunge pot. This is a fairly vague term Grunge: Both Nirvana and Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and Alice In Chains counted just in the early 90s to the grunge sizes - and yet the bands sounded completely different. While Nirvana based their music on punk rock, Pearl Jam the Classic Rock missed a lick of paint, and Alice In Chains installed hard rock and metal elements. While on the debut "facelift" my favorite song of the band, namely "Man in the Box", the successor to "Dirt" is yet mature and coherent in itself. Already the opening double "Them Bones" and "Dam That River" is an absolute highlight with the dry, hard riffs and the incomparable Doppelgesang of Layne Staley and Jerry Cantrell. On the other side are quieter numbers such as "Rooster" and "Down in a Hole". The bouncer "Would?" is then again a real song about. "Dirt" is not an album that sounds like a flower meadow in the summer for sure. It's dark, almost depressed - and that's what makes the charm of the plate. Gooder music listeners and hippies should therefore prefer to make a detour around "Dirt". All others should be as long as they not anyway have to pick up a piece of rock history to the house. Incidentally, I'm not one who says that everything was better and that everything after Staley's death has no value, "Black Gives Way To Blue" (2009) with new singer William DuVall I find almost as much as "Dirt".