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Despite the over abundance of 90’s grunge bands from Seattle, there are very few I still listen to. Nevertheless, I’m not sure Temple of the Dog, Pearl Jam, or Alice Chains will ever get too old for me. If you’re well-versed in your grunge, you know where I’m going with this… Mad Season was Barrett Martin (Screaming Trees), Mike McCready (Pearl Jam and Temple of the Dog), John Saunders (The Walkabouts), and Layne Staley (Alice in Chains). Although, I didn’t find Mad Season to be so much grunge as maybe some sort of drug-induced mixture of Alice in Chains and The Doors.
Mad Season was not at all what I expected. I knew they had a guitarist from Pearl Jam and the front-man from Alice in Chains, but I guess it didn’t occur to me how different those two bands really were. Their debut and only album Above (1995) starts out with the very mellow and rhythmically-light track Wake Up. This track reminds of something out of the late 60’s or early 70’s, aside from Layne Staley’s indistinguishable voice. I actually really like the song, it just took me a long time to break my associations with the band members and their previous projects in order to give Mad Season a fair chance. The second track on the album, X-Ray Mind, is closer to my original expectations, thus my thorough confusion with this album as a whole. X-Ray Mind makes a very clear contrast from Wake Up by starting with heavy drums as its intro… but then it throws another wrench in your gears by abruptly changing to a simple blues-rock drum beat with some pentatonic guitar licks. Props to them, they pulled it off. Guess what. The third track is just as different. In fact, Above is probably the most diverse an album can be while still managing to still be considered grunge (at least partially). The third track even got some radio play. River of Deceit was peaked as a #2 single for Rock Tracks in US. As you might expect, it’s not really my favorite track.
I can’t say that if you liked Pearl Jam or Alice in Chains then you’ll like Mad Season, but maybe I can if you like them both and The Doors. I’d say it would be best to listen to Above without any expectations, but Layne Staley’s voice is just so unique that it’s hard not to draw a connection to what you’ve heard before. Despite Mad Season’s short-lived popularity, I wouldn’t be surprised if you mistook them for Alice in Chains, decided not to get the album or couldn’t find Alice in Chain’s album with River of Deceit on it and gave-up. Given that this album came out in 1995 before the internet was the primary source of music purchasing/stealing, that scenario doesn’t seem so unlikely.
By the way, I’d love to find out who wrote that awful album review of Above on iTunes so I can never trust his/her opinion again. I don’t mean a customer review. I mean the actual album review that iTunes chose to post for the album. There’s no flaw in taking a side-project, nor does Mad Season sound like one. “As expected, Mad Season sounds like a cross between Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam…” There’s not much of a connection to Pearl Jam. While there is a connection with Alice in Chains, it’s not as you’d expect.
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