10 Perfect Albums That Will Make You Love Metal
5. Jar of Flies - Alice in Chains
The concept of heaviness is not always defined by the kind of riffs that you play. You can probably play some of the most detuned guitars that the world has ever heard, and it still might not work unless you have the real darkness in your soul. If you're coming from that dark of a headspace, you sometimes don't need distortion at all to win the crowd over.
Granted, when Alice in Chains were first starting acoustic material on SAP, fans needed a bit of an adjustment period, being a lot more concerned that the band that wrote We Die Young had gone soft. After making their drug fueled opus Dirt though, Layne Staley was really in a bad way, and these songs were a way of venting out all of his internal demons, with songs like Nutshell and Rotten Apple leaving nothing to the imagination about how far he had begun to spiral.
As much as this might still be a hard rock release from the band, this is the kind of stuff that might resonate with more country fans than traditional pop or rock fans, having the same kind of downtrodden loneliness that comes from everyone from Willie Nelson to Johnny Cash's best work. It might not be the most energetic or even the most optimistic record on a list like this, but you sometimes need to dig down deep in your soul to pull out something that no one has ever seen before.