Alice in Chains were one of the big four grunge bands, alongside fellow Seattle titans Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, and Nirvana (who were actually from Aberdeen, but no one knows where Aberdeen is). Of the four, only Pearl Jam is still a going concern. Sure, there's a band out there called Alice in Chains, and three of the four members were members of Alice in Chains, and they play Alice in Chains material, but they are not the band that wrote the album I'm talking about today, Dirt, and that's probably a good thing for the people in the current band calling itself Alice in Chains.

All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you,

Ska is one of those perennial bubbling-under-the-surface music genres. "Ska is dead" has the same valence (none) as "punk is dead"; it's never been true, it will never be true. Ska, like punk, is not dead, it's lying in ambush, and will strike when you least expect.

Ska is on an upswing right now, and tedious people have been calling for a "fourth wave" for a few years. Meanwhile, diehards like We Are The Union, and Reel Big Fish, and even (until Terry died in 2022) The Specials carried on skanking like they always did, Jer of Skatune Network dragged ska into the future by the hair, and a whole raft of new bands (none of whom I know much about, but check out literally everyone on Bad Time Records) cropped up without much caring what Billboard thought about it.

But let's jump back a minute and look at one of those diehard third-wave bands that're still out there doing it: Catch 22, and their first album, "Keasbey Nights".