Hopefully, I can shine some light on a few forgotten gems or turn some people on to stuff they haven’t heard before, and do it without any of the smugness that is so frequent and annoying in discussing music, a la “High Fidelity.” This week I want to look at the lone album produced by grunge supergroup Mad Season, entitled “Above.”
By 1995, grunge was in its death throes. Kurt Cobain was dead, Pearl Jam was refusing to tour in protest of TicketMaster and Brit-pop bands like Blur and Oasis were on the rise. Mad Season arose as a side project while all the members’ major acts were on hiatus.
The group was a collection of some of the best talent that the so called “Seattle scene” had to offer, with Mike McCready of Pearl Jam on guitar, Barrett Martin of Screaming Trees on drums and John Baker Saunders of The Walkabouts on bass.Alice in Chains’ front man Layne Staley was recruited by McCready for vocals—and Mad Season was born.
After a few radio broadcasts and one live performance, “Above” was released March 15, 1995. It would certify gold a few months later.
The album bears little of the “grunge sound” that every group of guys with guitars in the early ’90s was pigeonholed into. The first track, “Wake Up” starts off as a dark jazz groove and builds to a climactic wail, and Artificial Red is straight up 12 bar blues with signature Staley vocal riffing.
Other songs play more like a hypnotizing chant to the “gods of rock,” such as “Lifeless Dead” and the metal-influenced “I Don’t Know Anything.” Mark Lanegan, vocalist for Screaming Trees, comes in and lends his raspy drone to “I’m Above,” in addition to trading verses with Layne on “Long Gone Day.” Note that the sludge guitars, abusive drums and mumbled vocals that came to represent grunge are nowhere to be found.
Make no mistake, however: despite a solid rhythm section and deft guitar swirling from McCready, it is Staley’s tortured vocals and lyrics derived from his losing battle with heroin that make this album great.
In just a few years, the drugs would kill him, and it’s obvious through his performance that he can see it coming, and that he is powerless to stop it. “River of Deceit,” the only moderate hit on the album, gives us a glimpse into the life of a man helplessly locked into his downward spiral.
On the experimental “All Alone,” Staley is able to convey his pain using nothing but sounds. It is a cry for help from a shooting star that was about to fizzle out, and a haunting way to end the album.
If you want to know what it would sound like if some of the best musicians of the era got together in someone’s garage to jam for an evening, this is it. It is like nothing else produced during the grunge years, and is completely unique with respect to the members’ main bands. If there is one disappointing note on this album, it’s the loss of what could have been.
Before the group had a chance to record another album, Staley and Saunders would both overdose on heroin, and the music world would move on. It’s unfortunate that such a creative collaboration was never given the chance to grow. Although, perhaps, if they didn’t have their demons, we wouldn’t have gotten the rock.