Alice in Chains
Black Gives Way To Blue

Down the hole, once again, for the umpteenth time.

The past sometimes comes back, and you don’t know what to do with it: the point is, you can either keep looking at yourself in the mirror or turn your back and start living again. Jerry Cantrell, Sean Kinney, and Mike Inez have decided that perhaps it was worth turning their backs and starting again. This is the second life of the group, a new beginning.

Layne is no longer here, William DuVall has arrived. He is not Layne Staley, and he doesn’t even want to be. He doesn’t have the demonic and anguished tone of the never fully lamented Staley, he probably doesn’t even possess his talent. And yet...

And yet, they are still them, Alice in Chains, with their mood, their powerful and incisive sounds, the claustrophobic and suffocating atmospheres, sometimes angry, alternating with more intimate and reflective moments, the splendid vocal harmonies of the Cantrell-DuVall duo that manage to not make us mourn a very heavy and glorious past.

"Time to change has come and gone, watched your fears become your god".

Listening to the album is like glancing towards that never-forgotten past: "It's why you never tell me whatever's on your mind" sing Alice in Chains in the morbid advance of "A looking in view".

Leaden, slow and dark, claustrophobic at certain moments, melancholic and evocative at others. The quality of the pieces is very high, especially "Private Hell", "A looking in view", and the heavily distorted and dragging "Check my brain". However, some episodes give a sense of being unfinished.

There are acoustic moments reminding us of the group's second soul, the one that emerged in the past like lifeblood from a jar of flies. And like new lifeblood, some songs give chills: "Flowers on a cross remain, mark an ending scene" intone DuVall and Cantrell in "Private Hell", one of the most evocative moments of the album.

The album closes with "Black gives way to blue", a heartfelt (though perhaps a bit cloying) goodbye to the deceased friend, with Elton John's piano coloring the melody of the piece. The track is short and leaves a real sense of emptiness, stopping almost suddenly.

In 1992 Jerry Cantrell wrote "Down in a Hole". One of the best-known lines of the song goes: "I'd like to fly, but my wings have been so denied".

For certain musicians, it is impossible to deny them the chance to fly.