Mandatory Music and CD: Dirt by Alice in Chains

Dirt Review from All Music

Dirt Review by Steve Huey

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 (aside from the much-needed survival story of
"Rooster," a tribute to Cantrell's
Vietnam-vet father), but in the end, it's redeemed by the honesty of
its self-revelation and the sharp focus of its music. [Some versions of
Dirt feature "Down in a Hole" as the next-to-last track rather than the
fourth.]