This five-plus hour, 59 track Grateful Dead tribute album is a monument of living history – an image of their golden road branching out endlessly…. Pretty much every sound the band touched on or suggested gets represented – from ambient music (several sound-sculptures by Bryce Dessner of the National and experimental composer Tim Hecker’s “Transitive Refraction Axis for John Oswald”) to Afropop (Orchestra Baobob turning “Franklin’s Tower” into a shining desert mirage) to psychedelia (Flaming Lips making throbbing lysergic mush out of “Dark Star”) to roots rock (Lucinda Williams locating the lust in a slow humid “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad”). But indie songwriters and guitar nerds get most of the action; Courtney Barnett hazily savors the conversational drift of the post-Altamont rap session “New Speedway Boogie,” and Stephen Malkmus does his hey-whatever guitar wizard thing on a ten minute “China Cat Sunflower → I Know You Rider,” just to pick two of the more wonderful examples among many.
Tribute albums can be a profit center for record companies during dark times. They have a built-in fan base and they make great real-life, gift-wrapped, non-Spotify gifts. Day of the Dead is woefully original because its classics deviate so much from the original. Curated by The National, the erudite indie giants, the five-album set’s interpretations eschew the long jams that are Dead staples and inspired a million stoned dance moves at concerts. “Truckin’” in the hands of Marijuana Deathsquads is less a road anthem and more despairing cry. Lucius’s “Uncle John’s Band” isn’t Jerry Garcia’s amiable life lesson but something more solemn. Other versions hew closer to the original, like a Kurt Vile and the Violators “Box of Rain” and a live version of “I Know You Rider” by the Dead’s Bob Weir so rollicking that The National, who back him on the track, forget their trademark lugubriousness, and revel in this classic.
The Fat Angel Sings 