Top 10: Alice in chains

Today is the turn of a top 10 about Alice in chains, a band that I have always known kind of superficially but that I have only begun to pay attention to very recently. Now that I have a clearer idea of ​​their discography and I think I will be able to make a top 10 on them, as usual trying to pick up from as many albums as possible. 

Let's get started! 

10) Rooster (from Dirt) 
I mentioned in the introduction that I wasn't a particular fan or connoisseur of the band. In the 90s, however, when Rooster played on Heavy rotation on MTV, I always liked to listen to it all the time. Today it has been overtaken in the charts by a lot of songs.
Single from what, for now, is the last album of the band, Rainier fog (perhaps the most successful with Duvall, at least in my opinion), and certainly one of his flagship songs with a beautiful chorus and incisiveness that make it a perfect opener. Click on the title to listen to it. 

A gem that I only discovered with the recent purchase of the Live. It is not present in any album (if not in the Music Bank collection) but it is a song that I really appreciate in its madness and that in my opinion would have deserved space in the first album of the band, instead of some other song. 

7) Nutshell (from Jar of flies) 
Sweet and melancholy piece taken from the EP Jar of flies. By the way, I'll never understand why they are labelled as EPs when they last more than half an hour - So what do we do with the Beatles and Ramones catalogue? - Anyway, Nutshell is one of the most popular songs of the band with a beautiful ending. Here's the famous version of MTV Unplugged.
Superb vocal interpretation by Layne Staley who in the chorus shows us all her interpretative ability and the power of his best days. One of my favourite pieces of the Facelift debut and that I also really like live.. 

Easy listening song with one of my favourite Cantrell / Staley voice combinations and which reminds me so much of the Seattle representation in the films of that time (Singles, Clerks and many more...). Ah, this is an EP. And with this, I declare closed the controversy between myself and myself.

4) Heaven beside you (From Alice in chains)
This was the second single from their third studio album the self-titled (or Tripod, if you prefer). The preview of the video says everything: Jerry Cantrell does everything in this one, including the main vocals. Easy listening song with a chorus that will get stuck in your head forever.
One of the roughest starts in the history of music for the opener of my favourite album by the band, Dirt. As always, I want to make this chart as varied as possible, but I could very well have taken 10 tracks from that album. AH! (The start of the song)

This, instead, is the final track of that magnificent album which is Dirt (I took the first one and the last one to represent the album). Would? was my favourite track of the band until the sudden love for the number 1 below. 

1) Man in the box (from Facelift) 
The chorus that explodes with the power of Layne Staley's voice is one of those things that we will surely pass on to posterity. And if you listen to the live versions of that period it's even better, absolutely powerful and visceral. I post the video below, but you listen to it with the right volume and the right audio quality, please. Do yourself a favour and enjoy the listening.

Giovanni Gagliano

Passionate about music I wrote my first article for "Given To Rock" in 2012, reaching now 30K global followers. I am also a musician, gigging around London.

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