Alice In Chains

Sap

Two Stars for Two Magnificent Songs Out of a Possible Six!!!

Review Score:

(4/10)

Straightforwardly, at the very beginning, I'll clarify exactly where this cd, their first EP offering, stands in terms of relevance and approaching Alice In Chains with a fair, sober mind. Even though this little five song EP is by the most revered AIC, I feel that most of the reviewers here are misjudging it completely, romanticizing it with a bias so extreme-because it's their favorite band-that they're disadvantaging any naÃ¯ve person who'd read their reviews. The reason for this is because most reviewers who review this cd are looking at it with the most discriminatory, rose-colored glasses, dismissing the glaring flaws in this work and, instead, exclusively judge it narrow-mindedly as being up-to-par, due to AIC's reputation for perfection. Right? Well, not entirely, varmints. Everything besides the marginally few Got Me Wrong and Brother aren't just sup-par-they're also beneath what one should expect from the driven ideas behind Alice and beneath what they should've offered their "fans" in between albums, those years ago.

I remember watching an interview from Alice In Chains from November 1991, concerning this cd's release, to be more particular, just with Staley and Cantrell, and in said interview, Staley explained that Sean Kinney had a dream in which he dreamt that the songs for their band's next album were sappy, due to the songs being of a "milder" nature than their normal fare. Tragically, the self-deprecating notion of this EP's title seems to have been taken advantage of monstrously too literally, as the quality of "Right Turn", "Am I Inside" and the Untitled accident all reflect the same nature of disparagement that the title of SAP eludes too. The song "Right Turn" starts of deceitfully promisingly enough-but then something wretchedly unexpected happens. What started out grudgingly decently, with Cantrell singing and two acoustic guitars being strummed in a repentantly regretful invocation, mountingly begins to reveal its true, displeasing nature when it gets to the chorus. By this point, it furiously and absolutely sounds like a truly misused country-cowboy sort of ditty, further dissatisfying because this is practically the opposite of everything that Alice In Chains stands for. Next, this song worsens this foulness by totally falling apart as it progresses to its end, when the out of harmony, discordant voices of Arm, Cornell and Cantrell are fighting each other to be the loudest voice heard. Subsequently, the next pestilence on here is no better. It must be a curse that follows these two songs around, for my complaint's almost exactly identical to why I couldn't stand "Right Turn". "Am I Inside" is afflicted from the same plague that bothers "Right Turn", namely its chorus. The verses of "Am I Inside" start out, again, promising, what with its mysteriously esoteric, thought-provoking dark origins, but then, by now predictably, like "Right Turn", it kills any tolerance one can muster, in its chorus. Not only does the inherent melody seem inconsistent, but it's also made irremediably unsalvageable with the addition of one of the banshee Heart voices of those PMSers, because their wailing screeches are intolerable. Sadly, to keep this cumulative, I've also to cover the last of the wreck, Untitled, which, rightly so, should stay unnamed and unnoticed, seeing as it's just a poorly pitiable alibi to sneak in rotten fart noises, belches and other unsanitary bodily noises and incoherent chaos from AIC's members. To finalize how passionately I can't coexist with these three failures, I would even prefer AIC's demos from before they got a record deal. That's right, not the polished demos from Music Bank, but the low ones from the late 80s, where Alice, at the time, were struggling to decide whether to go legitimate or imitate the countless other ass-shaking bands of that humiliating, hair-swinging dark period in modern history.

If you ferociously jump to conclusions-wait for it-don't get ME wrong. My appreciation for AIC's potential and pure musical gift is so great that it dissatisfies me to see that these boys had squandered it on a track they probably weren't serious with to begin with. If they would have been dedicated to crafting all five of this EP's songs-not just the two-with purposeful determination, instead of shabbily mishandling the last three, then it would be a perfect package like the rest of their creations. More troublesomely for me, someone who never ceases to be impressed by Alice's continuing escalation of achievement in each of their songs, is that this EP undependably almost looks like it was done as an inside joke job by the members of AIC, because, as the last track indicates, they seem to have dilapidated into goofing-off misbehavior at that stage.

This is supposedly the last cd where Staley was licitly clean, right before his heroin habit started checking in on him, and was supposed to tide fans over until the release of the unmatchable DIRT. Like all bad things get counterbalanced with some good, so too does this cd offer gems, restricted to the 1st two songs, and that's it. It is plain to see why Got Me Wrong and Brother stand head and shoulder above the last three. Each of them has above average success with guitar solos (ascendingly remarkable considering the sappy material), infectiously memorable melodies and beats, great feeling and yearning in how either Staley/Cantrell hum and sing the songs, and transitionally sobering themes, such as in Brother. Brother, nonetheless, though using ambiguously disturbing subject matter, retains that classic AIC penchant for scarily and enormously delving into somewhat taboo, grave themes, yet resulting in an outcome that's consistently optimistic, exclusively due to the beauty with which it was composed, written and played. It's a blinding fact that for this EP to have ended in something entirely palatable, they should have nixed the unrelentingly aggravating guest appearances (HEART, HEART, HEART), nixed the unambitiously uninspired approaches to "Right Turn" and "Am I Inside", nixed the staggering withdrawal of solos and should have curbed Cantrell's singing more, leaving more for Staley.

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