Alice in Chains: "A Looking In View"

Perhaps the grunge era’s most derivative and nihilistically pointless band (and that’s saying something) has returned with a new singer, INXS-style, to provide a seven minute-long song that no one asked for. So why even review it?

Well, first and most unimportantly, because it’s an illustration of how little the band changed even when someone who was supposed to be a driving force in the lineup died. But second because it holds up a mirror to how little the genre itself privileges innovation. “A Looking In View” falls right back into place in the modern radio rock rotation without missing a beat. The length screams like a catastrophic bombshell that this band is relevant, that there are those who have been waiting for this supposed moment of unassailable technical prowess. (And they have: their reunion concerts have been well attended.) But it’s as if heavy rock flirted lazily with electronics in the late ’90s and early ’00s and then, confused, went back to palm muted guitars, lyrics that don’t mean a damn thing, and long, greasy hair. This song is as much an admission that grunge music didn’t aspire to much more than emulation of strategically selected bands than it is a glorious return to something halcyon.

I’m not sure how anyone can possibly find themselves nourished by this music anymore, can be entertained by anger so directionless, by production values so muddied, by dynamics so stilted. I don’t know who these Alice in Chains fans are, or how they are able to distinguish between this iteration of Alice in Chains and the last one, or any of the bands they sound like or that sound like them. I’ve read that the recent popularity of the reunion concert might be attributable to the concertgoer’s desire to return to a time in their lives when they didn’t worry about quagmires and nukes; when they were adolescents with bad taste in music and only their own problems to worry about. But a return to anything so brooding and boring seems like a return to having a parasitic, money-hungry tapeworm. This music leeches one’s desire to even listen to music anymore. But hey, KISS played my home town last night and 25,000 people came out. Maybe there’s my answer right there.