Alice in Chains - Rainier Fog

It’s another late one, but it’s a big one too. Legends and phoenixes of the 1990’s grunge movement, Alice in Chains follow up 2013’s The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here with their third LP after the passing of Lane Staley: Rainier Fog. I made a post sometime last year about my general preference for Alice in Chains over grunge’s major figurehead, Nirvana, but I didn’t mean it as any kind of jab at Nirvana’s legacy. I just really love what Alice in Chains did with grunge in the 1990’s, and they are probably my favorite band to come out of that movement, particularly because I think they brought a lot to grunge that other bands weren’t. They of course brought a significant metallic edge to the style, and Jerry and Layne’s vocal harmonies became a long-mimicked trademark of the band. But even when they weren’t making prominent use of either of those two signature traits, their passionate performances and creative compositions took grunge to the extreme depths of the human psyche that made the genre so fascinating, and something that other extreme metal acts have made a point to do as well, arguably largely due to Alice in Chain’s influence.

Of course, the 90’s came and went, and with it, grunge and its big names reached their peaks of public attention and with the losses of Staley and Cobain, it looked like two of the genre’s biggest progenitors were finished for good. While Nirvana disbanded, Alice in Chains recruited William DuVall, and in 2009 released one of the most emphatic comeback albums ever, Black Gives Way to Blue, dedicated to celebrating the life of Layne Staley. On Black Gives Way to Blue, Alice in Chains showcased the same compositional talent that their had honed on Dirt and Jar of Flies, and made an effective tribute to their former singer by expanding beyond their dejected melancholy and cynicism on truly sorrowful songs like the title track and “Private Hell”, while also reaching new heights of metallic sludge intensity with the ripping first single “A Looking in View”. If it’s not already apparent I am a tremendous fan of that album, and I think it was the critical moment that proved Alice in Chains’ importance as more than just a big name in the 90’s grunge scene. With their successful extension into darker, but also more emotionally dynamic territory, they proved that they were more than just grunge at that point, and that their signature sound represented them and shaped grunge more than grunge shaped them.

2013’s follow-up, The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here, was no major stumble, but of course following up 2009’s comeback triumph was going to be difficult. The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here found the band at extremes like the supremely sludgy and barely grungy “Stone”, and the eerie title track, but it was also a patchier effort and a larger pill to swallow at nearly 70 minutes. But the band still clearly put a lot into the project; it just had an uphill battle to begin with after Black Gives Way to Blue. Well the band took their time again with Rainier Fog, five years after The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here. So what does the band’s third post-Staley LP entail?

I found myself thankful for that little break full of annoying errands and academic stress in a few ways, one of which was the time I got to spend with Rainier Fog. Like both its predecessors, I had to temper my expectations and my scope to what the band were trying to do with this new album. With Black Gives Way to Blue, I expected the metallic onslaught “A Looking in View” foreshadowed, but was pleasantly surprised by the album’s ambition and emotional complexity. With The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here I was expecting some kind of expansion on the candid mourning of Black Gives Way to Blue, but got pretty exclusively some careful sonic experimentation. And with Rainier Fog, I was expecting this experimentation to continue and maybe amplify a little bit, but I also wasn’t completely sure given the space between the two albums. I had to sit with the album and adjust myself to all these various angles to simply find Alice in Chains simply trying to best represent every side of themselves that they’ve built over the years, including their earlier incarnation’s pinnacle of creativity in the 90’s. Rainer Fog, to me, feels like it better represents Alice in Chains as a whole than their other two 21^st century albums do. This is their grungiest release so far this millennium, but it doesn’t just find the band backpedaling and rehashing their more overtly eccentric character from albums like Facelift. It feels more like the band have approached the same stylistic goal with different tools this time around. The simple, repetitive, but sweetly catchy and crunchy grunge riff on the lead single and album opener, “The One You Know” harkens back to those early days’ songs like “Man in a Box”, while the chorus’ melancholic harmonies remind me more of their 2009 return. Other slower, denser songs like bass-y “Drone” and the down-tuned “Red Giant” add to this gloomy atmosphere the band cultivates so masterfully now that they could do it in their sleep.

The album does well to branch out and make itself as all-encompassing as possible, and it does so immediately after the first song with the up-tempo title track, very reminiscent of early songs like “No Excuses”, “Dam That River”, and “Sea of Sorrow”, and even newer material in that vein like “Lesson Learned”. Despite its curiously poor mastering, the bouncy title track works a few solid, memorable melodies into a simple, but cohesive verse-chorus structure and does well to prevent any kind of monotony early on in the track listing. The more low-key song “Fly” sound like it would have fit in perfectly with the eclectic mixture of tracks on Jar of Flies.

The second half of the album is a little less thrilling simply because in a number of ways the band start to repeat themselves. The semi-proggy “Deaf Ears Blind Eyes” conjures a black and white melancholy more by way of its monotony than by any vibrance of the instrumentation, and despite being the shortest song on the album, “So Far Under” drags on repetitively with a refrain that’s not quite up to par for Alice in Chains. I was reminded of the filler refrain on the song “Pretty Done” from the previous album. The second half does have its moments though. The song “Maybe” is a formidable grunge acoustic rocker with some tasteful gothic tendencies, and “Never Fade” sounds like a Dirt-era deep cut with a serious swagger and a truly, but subtly, uplifting chorus. The album’s closing track, the seven-minute “All I Am” is a bit too meek for a closer in my opinion, and could have used some more bold instrumental adventurousness to justify its length, but it does feel at least like a fitting conclusion of stoic release to the album.

After all the digestion it feels somewhat anticlimactic to say that so much of what can be said about this album can be taken from what’s already been said about Alice in Chains, but even though there isn’t a whole lot to add, to have what is said of fantastic works like Jar of Flies and Black Gives Way to Blue be applicable to this album is certainly a plus. As unambitious as this is for the band, it’s good to hear them again sounding as professionally as ever and as on top of their sound as ever.

Rainier Fog, like every Alice in Chains album I’ve been old enough to mentally process the release of, took some time to grow on me, but I found myself humming its melodies and infected with its rhythms in positively memorable ways more and more. I definitely don’t think it quite usurps Black Gives Way to Blue, but it sure makes for a fine addition to the band’s catalog, despite its few flaws. It’s a little bit front-loaded, but it doesn’t completely fall apart at the end. The band do a good job of covering their bases on the album and making something very well representative of their entire career in a reasonable time frame while not seeming overly nostalgic or too all over the place. I hope the band do keep the train rolling though, because I think some creative momentum could potentially benefit their future efforts. Another five years from now would be some truly late-stage Alice in Chains, and I get the feeling they might call it a day if it comes time to record and they don’t feel inspired enough after putting it off for too long after not feeling inspired enough, and this band definitely still had quality and untapped potential, and Rainier Fog provides another glimpse into it this decade.