ALICE IN CHAINS Facelift CD (1990)

Seattle in 1990 had a sound, and it wasn't the one that made the cover of Rolling Stone two years later. Before the mainstream caught up, Alice in Chains were doing something heavier, uglier and more honest than almost anyone else in the room.

Facelift is the record that established the template: Layne Staley and Jerry Cantrell's vocal harmonies sitting over riffs that owed as much to Black Sabbath as to anything happening in the Pacific Northwest at the time. We Die Young, Man in the Box, Sea of Sorrow, these aren't grunge songs in the flannel-and-feelings sense. They're metal songs with a death wish and a melody. The album didn't sell as fast as Nevermind or Ten but it hit harder, and the people who found it in 1990 never forgot it. Decades on, it still sounds like bad news delivered calmly.

CD. Full length studio album. USA. Grunge, heavy metal, dark alternative.

Fans of: Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots, Mad Season, Audioslave, Faith No More