Issue date: 9/15/06 Section: Arts & Entertainment

After a fairly dry summer as far as good rock releases go, the months of August and September have finally brought us a crop of important releases from some of the best artists out there. There have been some really great releases, like Stone Sour's Come What(ever) May, and some mediocre ones, such as Slayer's Christ Illusion. But out of the recent releases, it is likely that the one that might catch the eye of most Hendrix students is Alice in Chains' new compilation, The Essential Alice in Chains.

Alice in Chains, for the unaware, is a grunge band out of Seattle. Although they are classified as grunge, they tend to lean more toward the heavy metal-grunge than the sort of punk-grunge that bands such as Pearl Jam and Nirvana produced. The band had a large following in the 1990's and continued to produce new music until singer Lane Stanley's health began to decline, eventually leading to his death of a cocaine and heroin overdose eight years to the day after the death of Kurt Cobaine, the Nirvana front man.

First and foremost, this collection is completely unnecessary. Alice in Chains has already released four compilation albums: Nothing Safe: Best of the Box, Live, Music Bank, and Greatest Hits. And this album will not garner any new fans. It's the same old Alice in Chains, save for two remixes which do nothing for the album, and might even detract from it.

The casual AiC fan would just buy Greatest Hits, the more interested should buy Music Bank, and the serious fan can afford to get all of AiC's short list of albums.

Another reason not to buy this album is that the track order is quite eclectic. The album is almost in chronological order, but for some reason takes the song "Would?" and places it at the end for no real reason. I also would question the omission of "Bleed the Freak" and "Fear the Voices." In an album that contains all of their other singles, it seems quite odd to omit both their first and last.

There really is no reason to buy this album, unless you are a completionist and feel the need to own every CD AiC puts out. It's not that this is a bad album, it just has nothing new to offer fans. I'm giving this album a 2 out of 5. The metal man has spoken.

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