10 Legendary Albums That Will Make You Love Grunge
2. Dirt - Alice in Chains
It's easy to categorize most of grunge as being a fairly dirty genre. Since most of the biggest bands came from the rainy city of Seattle, it makes sense that they would play music that was a little bit on the dour side compared to the sounds of Los Angeles. There was a bit of an X-factor to Alice in Chains' Dirt, and that was the kind of darkness coming from within.
Around the time that they were working on their second full length, the band had started getting into some serious drug problems, which coats the entire record in a sort of haze. Layne Staley wasn't especially shy about this kind of writing either, laying it out clear as day how much heroin had an effect on him on songs like the title track and Sickman. Even the songs that don't have drug connotations have a dark undercurrent to them, like Rooster being a tribute to Jerry Cantrell's father and sounding like a journey into Hell for nearly 6 minutes.
If there was an album that embodied the feeling of the word grunge though, this really takes the cake, giving you a feeling as if you're crawling through mud from the minute it starts. For as pitch black as this is, there's also a haunting beauty behind a lot of these tunes that makes you want to come back for more. Alice were tapping into something a lot more vicious this time, and it almost feels like they're trying to perform musical exorcisms to cleanse themselves of their demons.