Nothing Safe will debut at #20 on the Billboard Top 200 albums chart
AIC's Nothing Safe — The Best of the Box will debut at #20 on the Billboard 200 albums chart
Alice In Chains Re-Emerge With 'Get Born Again'
Influential grunge band storms radio with new single from compilation LP; three-CD box set due in fall.
Senior Writer Gil Kaufman reports:
After a nearly four-year absence, Seattle's Alice in Chains have returned to radio and record stores with a vengeance over the past few weeks.
The influential grunge quartet's "Get Born Again" — its first new radio song since 1995 — sits at or near the top of playlists in several rock-radio formats.
The compilation album from which the song is drawn, Nothing Safe — The Best of the Box, will debut at #20 on the Billboard 200 albums chart this week on sales of 71,079, according to album sales tracker SoundScan.
"[AIC] is like the Led Zeppelin of the '90s." — Cyndee Maxwell, Radio & Records rock editor All of which is good news for fans and radio program directors who've been eagerly awaiting new music from the band since its eponymously titled studio album came out four years ago.
"There's always a lot of excitement for new music from a band that had such a huge impact on alternative music," said Dave Richards, program director for Chicago alternative station WKQX (Q101 FM), where the song is the sixth-most-played track.
Built around singer Layne Staley's menacingly dark vocals and guitarist Jerry Cantrell's thundering guitar lines, "Get Born Again" (RealAudio excerpt) — one of two new songs recorded by the group last year — fits in seamlessly with the compilation's 14 other similarly brooding tracks, which sample the early phase of the band's career.
"[AIC] is like the Led Zeppelin of the '90s," Cyndee Maxwell, rock editor at the trade magazine Radio and Records, said.
Maxwell said "Get Born Again" has had a strong showing in a number of radio formats, coming in at #2 last week behind the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Scar Tissue" (RealAudio excerpt) in active-rock formats, at #12 on the rock charts and dropping from #13 to #16 at alternative radio stations.
The success of the song, which went to radio in early June, hasn't surprised Maxwell, who said AIC is "absolutely" a core band for the active-rock format, despite the rise of a number of new hard-rock bands that mix hip-hop and heavy rock guitars.
"Smart radio programmers know how to mix in their staple artists, like AIC, with new sounds like Limp Bizkit and Korn," Maxwell said.
The 15-song Nothing Safe is intended as a teaser for a three-CD box set, Music Bank, which is slated for a fall release.
The sampler showcases the band's earlier material, as does the box set. "It's going to have a bunch of stuff they cut when they were trying to get signed," Jen Kern, a spokesperson for the group's management, said.
Among the early demos on the album is a 1989 version of the song "We Die Young." The rest of the collection revisits the group's greatest hits, including such career-making songs as "Man in the Box" (RealAudio excerpt), "Them Bones," "Angry Chair," a live version of "Rooster," "Got Me Wrong" (from MTV's "Unplugged"), "No Excuses," "I Stay Away," "Grind," "Again" and "Would?"
Also included on the sampler are the songs "Iron Gland," "Down in a Hole" and "What the Hell Have I" (from the "Last Action Hero" soundtrack).
Fans of the group — which emerged from the fertile Seattle grunge scene in the early '90s — have been primed for new material since AIC's label, Columbia Records, prematurely promoted the box set in the industry trade magazine Billboard under the tentative title Men in a Box, in 1997.
Those fans have been snapping up Nothing Safe.
"I bought it the day it came out," Tony Thunder, singer/guitarist for the New York AlC cover band Facelift, wrote in an e-mail. Thunder wrote that he feels "Get Born Again" is on a par with the band's previous hits and added that his group is planning to put it on their setlist.
Thunder wrote that he was a bit disappointed in the rest of the album, citing "We Die Young" as a standout amid live tracks, demos, hits and unreleased material he said didn't always impress him. " 'Rooster' live lets me know that we do AIC live better than they do," Thunder crowed. But he added that he would listen to old AIC music before he'd tune in to such new hard rockers as Limp Bizkit and Korn.
In October, AIC's members — guitarist Cantrell, singer Staley, bassist Mike Inez and drummer Sean Kinney — tracked "Get Born Again" and another new song, "Died," their first recorded efforts together in more than three years.
The response to "Get Born Again" was enthusiastic at alternative and rock radio, where many program directors reported the song easily staked its claim alongside such younger contemporaries as Korn and rap-rocker Kid Rock.
Dave Douglas, program director of WAAF (107.3 FM) in Boston, said his station had no qualms about immediately adding the song to its rotation at 25-plus spins per week.
"We would have been questioned by our audience as to why we didn't play it if we hadn't," Douglas said. "Their audience has been waiting for a long time for something new from AIC."
The compilation was a brisk seller at the group's hometown Seattle indie store Easy Street Records, where product manager Zoe Sandall said it moved a respectable 12 copies in its first week. "They're a strong catalog seller here," Sandall said, "we expected it to do well."
Despite the album's debut in the top 20 on the Billboard chart, several major U.S. retailers said they were disappointed in the album's sales at some of their outlets. Managers at Chicago and Los Angeles Tower Records stores said the album barely broke into their top-30 sales chart, leading them to suspect fans are waiting for the box set.
"At one time these guys would have easily been in the top 10 their first week," Larry King, product manager at the Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, said.
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