Anthem of the Sun
| Grateful Dead
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Anthem of the Sun
Anthem of the Sun is the second album by rock band the Grateful Dead. Released in 1968, it is the first album to feature second drummer Mickey Hart, who joined the band in September 1967. The album was ranked number 288 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, in both the 2003 and 2012 iterations of the list.
It was voted number 376 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums.
The mix of the album combines multiple studio and live recordings of each song. The result is an experimental amalgam that is neither a studio album nor a live album, but both at the same time (though it is usually classified as a studio album).
Drummer Bill Kreutzmann's description of the production process describes the listening experience of the album as well: "...Jerry [Garcia] and Phil [Lesh] went into the studio with [Dan] Healy and, like mad scientists, they started splicing all the versions together, creating hybrids that contained the studio tracks and various live parts, stitched together from different shows, all in the same song — one rendition would dissolve into another and sometimes they were even stacked on top of each other... It was easily our most experimental record, it was groundbreaking in its time, and it remains a psychedelic listening experience to this day."-"Wikipedia"
Critic Reviews
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Rolling Stone
The mixture of electronic and serious music achieved by Edgar Varese on “Deserts” stands as one of the most impressive achievements in this area; on their own terms the Dead have achieved a comparable blend of electronic and electric music. For this reason alone Anthem of the Sun is an extraordinary event.
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All Music
Musically, the Dead's instrumental excursions wind in and out of the primary theme, ultimately ending up in the equally frenetic "Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks)." Although the uninitiated might find the album unnervingly difficult to follow, it obliterated the pretension of the post-Sgt. Pepper's "concept album" while reinventing the musical parameters of the 12" LP medium.
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Altrockchick
the motivation behind the album was to recreate the experience of The Dead’s live act through the recording technology available in the studio, you hear studio and live performance segments melded together within a single track. Further reinforcing the non-linear nature of the record, some of the tracks melt into the next, so you do not know where you are unless you happen to be staring at your track counter when you’re listening to the album.
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Albumism
Anthem Of The Sun is psychedelia and the album itself is an intoxicating call to action, more than just Bob Weir yelling “C’mon everybody. Get up and dance, it won’t ruin ya!” See it on the album cover in the mandala shape of a face, made up of the faces of the band members, a face inside a face inside another: the ultimate trip.
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Uncut
a dense hybrid of studio and live that tried to capture the strange new sound they were assembling on the West Coast. The result was an experimental record, in the truest sense; one that fails more often than it succeeds, but always in interesting and instructive ways.
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Ultimate Classic Rock
Even if the album may not be the band's best studio work, it could be its most interesting recording. At the very least, Anthem of the Sun would provide the map for future Dead adventures. By the time they made their next album, Aoxomoxoa, the Grateful Dead had a clearer vision of their definitive sound.
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PopMatters
Anthem of the Sun comes out of the gate swinging – the band's ambition is obvious right away as the opening track. Not content to make cut-and-dried studio albums, Anthem sees the Dead mixing studio recordings with live music, a technique used best on the second side.
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Spectrum Culture
it’s unlikely that Anthem of the Sun will win over any Grateful Dead skeptics; its reliance on extended guitar solos, however creatively assembled, will inherently limit its appeal to the jam-inclined. Viewed apart from the group’s hoary reputation, Anthem is first and foremost an impressively weird album: more experimental and genuinely psychedelic than the Dead are generally given credit for.
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