Day Of The Dead, the 59-track-long Grateful Dead tribute curated by The National, is big.
I mean, it’s really big. It’s less a homage to the Dead than it is a sun-sized behemoth – a kind of ‘who’s who’ roll call of indie talent in the year 2016. For that reason, you don’t even need to be a Deadhead to enjoy it. If you’ve liked an American record released in the last five years, chances are someone responsible for it is on this album.
In fact, it’s so impossibly, inhumanly, disgustingly large that a straight-up review wouldn’t even be able to touch the sides of the thing. So we’ve cherry-picked ten of the highlights.
You can stream the full album at the bottom of this page.
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‘New Speedway Boogie’ – Courtney Barnett
It’s almost becoming a cliché to be an Australian rock critic who adores everything that Courtney Barnett puts her mind to. But what do you want from me? When Barnett turns out tunage this good, it’d be a crying shame to ignore it simply to buck the trend of Barnett-lovin’. Everything about this one works. Barnett makes it recognisably hers without ever trying to alter the joys of the original, creating a slice of sheer sun-blasted pleasure in the process. Get on it.
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‘Box Of Rain’ –Kurt Vile and The Violators (featuring J Mascis)
Kurt Vile is the modern day J Mascis: a guitar god with a dry sense of humour and a set of the nimblest fingers around. It was only a matter of time before the pair teamed up – here they are turning the Dead’s seminal ‘Box Of Rain’ into a deliciously oversaturated work of art.
Best of all, though technical precision rules the day on this one, the pair still leave a great deal of space for some true heart to flow through. The Dead might be best known for their extended jams, but they were a band that valued emotion as much as a good old-fashioned trip, making this particular cover version a very special beast indeed.
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‘Cream Puff War’– Fucked Up
The Grateful Dead’s original
This one’s weird. I mean, it’s really weird. But who cares? In fact, this fried, frenzied version of ‘Cream Puff War’ is a jolt in Day Of The Dead‘s arm – a perfect U-turn pulled exactly when the compilation most needs it. There’d be no point lining up 59 bands to blast out the straightest Dead covers around.
After all, it’s easy to forget that though these days Jerry Garcia is your dad’s hero rather than the pariah of the cool kids, he was one of the most inventive songwriters of his time – a man who never once stuck to the critical consensus. It might be a clichéto imply he’d be proud of this track, but it’s certainly true that Fucked Up’s pseudo-heavy metal vocals would be exactly the kind of middle finger Garcia himself might have popped out back in the day.Exemplary stuff.
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‘Cumberland Blues’ – Charles Bradley and Menahan Street Band
The Grateful Dead by way of ‘70s exploitation cinema, Charles Bradley’s take on ‘Cumberland Blues’ is a delicious slice of dialled-up-to-11 rock’n’roll, and a blasting reminder of the Dead’s singular gifts when it came to crafting earworm-y hooks.
True, ‘Cumberland Blues’ might not be the band’s best-known track, but it’s the one that perfectly encapsulates a whole period of their output – the years from 1970 to 1974, when they mastered the pop hook and learnt how to combine upright rock blasting with a good ol’ dash of Gonzo-style madness. Fittingly then, ‘Cumberland Blues’ is insane. But so are the very forces Garcia spent his life railing against – the very forces Bradley takes up the charge against. In short: it’s nuts, but so is the world.
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‘Peggy-O’ – The National
The Dead and The National share essential DNA. They’re two musical acts obsessed with the grimness behind glamour – bands that know lengthy instrumentals don’t need to just be a distraction plonked in the middle of a song. Breakdowns and freakouts can be the song’s heart, the very thing that sends their tunes flying into their requisite parts.
For that reason, The National’s take on ‘Peggy-O’ is a cover version made in heaven. ‘Peggy-O’ might not technically be a Grateful Dead song, but it’s one the band played throughout the course of their career. It’s the most Jerry Garcia song that Jerry Garcia never wrote: a ballad that stakes its claim in the place where beauty and horror overlap. Garcia knew that there was nothing passive about love. He understood that the more saccharine a song was, the harder it had to be; the angrier it needed to sound.
Of course, that’s also been the point of The National’s sound for as long as they’ve been around. It’s the cold fire that burns through ‘Mistaken For Strangers’ and ‘Sea Of Love’; the twisted, bone-thin version of love that sits at the centre of High Violet, leering. No wonder the band dedicated so much time and energy erecting this towering tribute to the Dead – without that seminal band, The National might not exist.
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‘Attics Of My Life’ – Angel Olsen
The Grateful Dead’s original
This one’s not a song. It’s a hymn. It’s a rasping attempt to draw breath, as profound as an obscenity and as pitiful as a prayer. Angel Olsen’s voice is as powerful here as it has ever been outside of a live show. It’s a bonfire inside a church – a ruin inside a palace – and every single line rings true.
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‘Ripple’ – The Walkmen
‘Ripple’ is arguably the Dead’s trademark tune. In fact, it’s that selfsame legendary status that might explain why post-punk crooners The Walkmen have let sleeping dogs lie on this one – in many ways this is the straightest cover in the collection, and the eccentric flourishes that mark out every other track on this list are nowhere to be seen here.
Not that that’s a problem. Not for a minute, in fact. There’s something unashamedly sincere about this cover, and by taking the Dead at face value The Walkmen have in the process delivered one of the most unabashed compliments available on Day Of The Dead. “You don’t need messing with,” is what this cover of ‘Ripple’ says. “You’re fine as you are.”
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‘To Lay Me Down’ – Perfume Genius, Sharon Van Etten and friends
Sure, this track might contain significantly less Van Etten than her legion of dedicated fans might be after, but that doesn’t trim the wings off this one in the slightest. It trembles. It soars.
Mike Hadreas, AKA the man behind the Perfume Genius moniker, has never been afraid of pushing beauty all the way through till it becomes kitsch, and here that overexuberance is perfectly tempered by Van Etten’s reserve. This is the sound of two artists doing two completely different things in the space of the same song, never crowding one another or distracting from the power of the other’s voice. In that way it doesn’t only succeed as a Grateful Dead cover, it succeeds as a song in its own right; one that stands firmly on its own two legs without a discography the size of a small nation to prop it up.
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‘China Cat Sunflower – I Know You Rider’ – Stephen Malkmus and The Jicks
Trust Malkmus to be the one with the nerve to swallow a double-headed Dead track. This twofer is about as energised and ecstatic as one could hope for – a good time that slowly transforms into an even better one. It’s all psychedelic stylings and Malkmus’ nasal, brilliant “I’m almost bored” tone, but even then it doesn’t sound like Pavement wearing Jerry Garcia’s dusty old jacket. It finds a meeting point between Malkmus’ Jicks and the Dead’s sound, creating a strange, trembling new style that resembles neither band. That in and of itself is pretty special.
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Terrapin Station (Suite) – Daniel Rossen, Christopher Bear and The National
The Dead weren’t sprinters. They were marathon runners. ‘Terrapin Station’ is exactly that – a sprawling trip through everything that made the band legendary. With all its excess and its exuberance, its melancholy and its might, this Rossen-led cover is the jewel in Day Of The Dead‘s well-studded crown. It’s not just good, it’s important. If you’ve never listened to a Dead track in your life, this is the one to start with, either the band’s original version or this cover. And the fact that the two are even vaguely equal is just a tribute to the magic that Rossen and his pals weave. Listen to every second of these 17 minutes. Drink ’em up. Then hit that repeat button and do it all over again.
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Day Of The Deadis out now through 4AD/Remote Control.
