Various Artists
Day Of The Dead
(4AD)
THIS sprawling album of Grateful Dead covers has been created and curated by brothers Aaron and Bryce Dessner of American indie favourites The National, with profits going to HIV/AIDs charity the Red Hot Organization. Pulling it all together took them four years, but if you're a Deadhead – the name given to the famously loyal fans of the 1960s musical polymaths and counter-culture heroes – you'll doubtless appreciate the effort. If you're not a fan, this album will make you one: its 59 tracks cover most of the band's long career and show the breadth of their musical interests, but at heart it reveals bandleader Jerry Garcia to have been a songwriter of rare genius, a man as adept at re-tooling British folk ballads, jazz rags and blues hollers as he was at churning out 25 minute space-rock odysseys or sunny West Coast psychedelia.
Among the diverse array of contributors are Orchestra Baobab, Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo, Antony Hegarty (as Anohni) and Mumford & Sons, though it's Courtney Barnett who gets the plum job: covering the wonderful New Speedway Boogie. The National's take on Morning Dew and Peggy-O are also pretty special – in their hands they become epic, booming dirges – and Bill Callahan takes a similar approach on Easy Wind, slowing it down to brooding pace. That the originals all feel like they were tossed off in a hurry by a band on the run simply underlines the richness of the source material.
Barry Didcock
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