The big task for Alice in Chains on their 2009 comeback Black Gives Way to Blue was to prove they could carry on battered and bruised, missing Layne Staley but still in touch with their core. They had to demonstrate the band had a reason to exist, and Black Gives Way to Blue achieved this goal, paving the way for another record just like it. Enter The Devil Put the Dinosaurs Here, a record that is pretty close to identical to Black Gives Way to Blue in its sound, attack, and feel. Where it differs is in the latter, as the overall album feels lighter and, at times, the individual songs do, too. "Scalpel" flirts with the acoustic bones of Jar of Flies and also has perhaps the richest melody here, working as a song, not a grind…

It's hard not to feel for Alice in Chains - all the guys in the band were lifers, all except lead singer Layne Staley, who never managed to exorcise his demons, succumbing to drug addiction in 2002. Alice in Chains stopped being a going concern long before that, all due to Staley's addictions, and it took guitarist Jerry Cantrell, bassist Mike Inez, and drummer Sean Kinney a long time to decide to regroup, finally hiring William DuVall as Staley's replacement and delivering Black Gives Way to Blue a full 14 years after the band's last album. To everybody's credit, Black Gives Way to Blue sounds like it could have been delivered a year after Alice in Chains: it's unconcerned with fashion; it's true to their dark, churning gloom rock; and if you're not paying attention too closely, it's easy to mistake DuVall for his predecessor…

When Alice in Chains' debut album, Facelift, was released in 1990, about a year before Nirvana's Nevermind, the thriving Seattle scene barely registered on the national musical radar outside of underground circles (although Soundgarden's major-label debut, Louder Than Love, was also released that year and brought them a Grammy nomination). That started to change when MTV jumped all over the video for "Man in the Box," giving the group a crucial boost and helping to pave the way for grunge's popular explosion toward the end of 1991. Although their dominant influences - Black Sabbath, the Stooges - were hardly unique on the Seattle scene, Alice in Chains were arguably the most metallic of grunge bands, which gave them a definite appeal outside the underground; all the same, the group's sinister, brooding, suffocating sound resembled little else gaining wide exposure on the 1990 hard rock scene…

Dispelling rumors of their demise due to Layne Staley's heroin addiction, Alice in Chains is a sonically detailed effort that ranks as their best-produced record, and its best moments are easily some of their most mature music. Alice in Chains relies less on metallic riffs and more on melody and texturally varied arrangements than the group's previous full-length albums, finally integrating some of the more delicate acoustic moods of their EPs. The lyrics deal with familiar AIC subject matter - despair, misery, loneliness, and disappointment - but in a more understated fashion, and the lyrics take on more uplifting qualities of toughness and endurance, which were missing from much of their previous work…

Dirt is Alice in Chains' major artistic statement and the closest they ever came to recording a flat-out masterpiece. It's a primal, sickening howl from the depths of Layne Staley's heroin addiction, and one of the most harrowing concept albums ever recorded. Not every song on Dirt is explicitly about heroin, but Jerry Cantrell's solo-written contributions (nearly half the album) effectively maintain the thematic coherence - nearly every song is imbued with the morbidity, self-disgust, and/or resignation of a self-aware yet powerless addict. Cantrell's technically limited but inventive guitar work is by turns explosive, textured, and queasily disorienting, keeping the listener off balance with atonal riffs and off-kilter time signatures…

Due to its unfortunate timing - arriving in stores about two months after the passing of his former bandmate, Layne Staley - it may be impossible not to view Jerry Cantrell's second solo album, Degradation Trip, without hearing it through the prism of the demise of Alice in Chains and the death of Staley. First of all, the sound is instantly reminiscent of Cantrell's former band because, of course, he was instrumental in creating the slow, brooding minor-key grinds topped with flat vocal harmonies that were the group's stock in trade. Second, if you dig through the lyrics, it's easy to speculate that some of them are about the addiction that sunk Staley. These two qualities are so prominent that some may have a hard time getting around them, but serious listeners and longtime fans will find it much easier to get past the surface and appreciate the album as Cantrell's best record since Dirt…

Think of the one-shot Seattle supergroup Mad Season as the grunge version of sober living. Guitarist Mike McCready, best known as the main six-string slinger in Pearl Jam, met bassist John Baker Saunders while in rehab, and the two paired with Screaming Trees' drummer Barrett Martin and Alice in Chains vocalist Layne Staley, partially in hopes of steering the singer onto the path of the straight and narrow. Ultimately, the plan didn't pan out, but for a brief while, the quartet - who adopted the name Mad Season - did have their moment of clarity, captured on the 1995 album Above. There was a single issued to modern rock radio - "River of Deceit" - but this record downplayed easy hooks and melody in favor of churning introspection and slow vamps that occasionally flirt with blues…