10 Perfect 90s Albums That Changed Rock And Roll Music
8. Jar of Flies - Alice in Chains
Every single great Alice in Chains album has always been informed by sadness in one way or another. Even though Facelift may have gotten the ball rolling for the Seattle hopefuls, Dirt definitely had much more of a vicious streak to it, as Layne Staley started to become a lot more candid about his struggles with heroin addiction. As the band soldiered on through the country though, they needed to nurse their wounds, and Jar of Flies was the sound of recovery.
After trying time and time again to clean up, this is where Layne Staley really starts to lose contact with the rest of the band, getting more and more desperate in his lyrics knowing that he's fighting a losing battle on songs like I Stay Away and Nutshell. For all of their metal credentials though, this is much more of an acoustic affair, sticking to little to no electric guitar for most of these tunes to let the emotion stand by themselves.
As much as a song like Swing on This might add a bit of levity at the end of it all, the crux of the album tends to revolve around pain, which would end up turning a little too real when Layne barely made it through the next album and then passed away while the band went on hiatus in the early '00s. Metal is supposed to be on the darker side most of the time, but before there was metal, there was country, and these are the kind of lowdown tunes that could have easily come out of someone like Willie Nelson just a few years before.