#468 The Grateful Dead - American Beauty

Another Alex rec.

I have heard startlingly little of The Grateful Dead, generally writing them off as being 'guitar music by stoners for stoners', best experienced live and high, approximating the best faded day on the a porch with your buddy who plays guitar pretty good experience ever, but ill suited for being heard recorded and sober. Their reputation for jamminess precedes them.

This album does a fair bit to belie that impression: the songs are briskly paced, generally bereft of solos or indulgence of any kind. In fact, it's all pretty acoustic, more Americana than I ever realized, most twang and pluck than noodle. Which isn't to say that the playing isn't deft, its just not bombastic about it, laying down twitchy, nuanced runs.

This is music that wears a rut in your soul, but that rut has not as of yet been worn in mine. The listening is, at least at first, actually a bit unmellow. The vocals are somewhere between Young and Dylan on the strained scale, and to call the harmonizing loose is an understatement. On one hand it all lends a scraggly charm, but the offness grated on the back of my mind. If I could sing along and pile my own voice on those ramshackle harmonies I'd probably be a happy man, but until that day 3/5

You might like this if: you like dusty, honky tonk folk, and don't mind if the wheels're a bit warped and the axle a little square.