Like most people who weren't in Seattle in the late eighties, my first exposure to Alice in Chains was the song "Man in the Box," an arresting slice of blatant talkbox abuse and landslide guitar coupled with a big beat and a creepy guy singing exquisitely morbid lyrics. I first heard the song on the radio in its censored version (and saw it later in the video that gradually ended up in endless rotation on MTV), and when I bought the FACELIFT album, I was surprised to discover that a couple of lines were considerably ruder (but made more sense) on the album. I also discovered that it wasn't even the best song on the album (that would be "Sea of Sorrow," which the video version butchered by removing the first verse and editing it badly), and that the album was actually pretty good, with a lot of variety in the sounds, some catchy songs, and seriously dark lyrics steeped in alienation and paranoia.
I keep coming back to FACELIFT long after the scene around them disintegrated (much like the band itself) in a long string of overdoses and suicides because of its combination of catchy, guitar-heavy songs and near-psychotic intensity. The first side of the album is a series of bleak vignettes of futility, nihilism, and madness that culminate in "Love, Hate, Love," a deeply psychotic declaration of confusion and violence whose disturbing lyrics are only heightened by Layne Staley's unhinged vocal performance. The second half of the album isn't quite as tight, but it has its moments, and ends with "Real Thing," Staley's first peek into the world of the addict just waiting to relapse. It wouldn't be the last Staley had to say on the subject -- DIRT, one of the starkest and most honest depictions of addiction, from the perspective of people with plenty of first-hand experience regarding the world his drug-addled fuckups, remains one of the most compelling albums from the grunge era -- but it would be the catchiest.
The album is uneven, to be sure -- the album loses momentum in the last half of the album, a fact that's not helped by the ridiculous "I Know Somethin (Bout You)," whose terrible lyrics are made even more irritating by the bad attempt at funk. But "Sunshine" and parts of "Confusion" make use of the dark vocal harmonies that would come to dominant their later albums, and "It Ain't Like That" has a great creeping guitar riff that just adds to the morbid lyrics. And then there's "Real Thing," the rehab song that would prove gruesomely prophetic as the band's future was ultimately derailed by Staley's descent into hardcore heroin addiction, which ended with his death in 2002. Still, while this is not the band's best album -- that honor goes to DIRT -- it's certainly a lot more listenable and not quite as relentlessly bleak and hopeless.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facelift_(album)
