Tuesday, August 16, 2011

The Grateful Dead - Aoxomoxoa


This is my favourite Grateful Dead record, there’s an experimental edge missing from most of their other studio work. We all know of course that it’s the live material which best serves the legacy of the Dead anyway, but personally most of their studio work is kind of... boring? Workingman’s Dead was alright but I’ve yet to make it through American Beauty before skipping back to Friend of the Devil and stopping.

Aoxomoxoa is the same forwards as it is backwards.

There are two mixes, the common one on every CD and the original mix, which was out of print by the early 70’s. The original mix completely overshadows the common mix. In basically all of the ways. In fact, when listening to the standard mix it always felt like there was something not quite there. The original mix is spot on and is the best you can get from the Dead, live or studio. That’s right. This is better than Live/Dead, Skull Fuck, any of those albums. The standard mix? Good, but slightly below Live/Dead, but better than Skull Fuck.

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