Of Seattle’s four great musical exports, Alice in Chains could always claim to be the bleakest. They lacked Nirvana’s pop sensibilities, Soundgarden’s machismo, and Pearl Jam’s intricate stringwork; they just tuned down the guitars and belted out drug-laden slabs of heavy metal, interspersed with beautifully sad acoustic releases. It couldn’t last, of course. The band had lost relevance long before the death of singer Layne Staley in 2002. But 2009 saw a reformed, revitalised Alice in Chains surge back into public consciousness, with new frontman William DuVall helming their comeback Black Gives Way to Blue.

And the sequel continues in the same vein. The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here, AIC’s fifth full-length album, is certainly heavy. They sound more like the American Black Sabbath than ever, as guitars churn and lurch, drums drive, and the vocals especially recall Ozzy Osbourne’s gnarly attack. DuVall actually shines here, giving a performance that should disperse his last pockets of resistance. The record opens with ‘Hollow’, a monolithic slab of knotty, Drop C riff-heavy rock which bulldozes anything before it. Band founder Jerry Cantrell’s appetite for destruction remains undiminished as he extracts some impressively low tones from his guitar, most noticeably on ‘Stone’ and ‘Phantom Limb’. Luckily, melody does not suffer for it. By and large, AIC retain the musical acumen which made them such a potent commercial force in the first place, DuVall and Cantrell exchanging eerie harmonies over a bed of grooving guitars.

Problems? Well, the record lacks the raw, harrowing power of 1993’s Dirt, an agonised, tormenting chronicle of heroin addiction. Perhaps that is a good thing. Unfortunately, it does all become a tad monotonous as the songs occasionally lose their way in a thick fog of distortion. For example, ‘Lab Monkey’ breaks into one of the best choruses on display, an arpeggio chiming over the top of the vocal, but you have to trudge through two-and-a-half minutes of laboured riff to get there. A change in pace or a lightening of atmosphere might compromise on deliberate claustrophobia, but it would make the record more consistently interesting; only the acoustic-driven ‘Voices’ and ‘Scalpel’, though equally brooding, bring some welcome relief from the overdriven sludge. The relatively monochrome textures should not, however, distract from the songs themselves, which usually contain enough hooks to reel the drifting listener back in. Overall, this is a strong effort from a band who never fail to deliver when it comes to dark, heavy rock music.