ALBUM REVIEW: Grateful Dead - Aoxomoxoa

    With their previous studio album Anthem of the Sun, the Grateful Dead had finally found their niche. It almost certainly helped that throughout 1968, the Dead continued to hone their craft both as songwriters and musicians, and even by March of that year their shows had taken on a new, expansive identity, prone to jams that stretched beyond the 10 and 20 minute mark and a certain energy on-stage that had to be seen to be believed. They had cemented themselves as the quintessential live act—if you were going to see any band live, you had to go see the Grateful Dead. 1969 would assert this legacy of their shows eventually, but that's a review for the near future. There's one other album to cover before that, and that's the strange case of Aoxomoxoa. Strange in the sense that no other Grateful Dead album has been so confined to the studio as this one, making full use of strange effects and experimentation, and recorded across nearly seven months of time. In many ways, it's a milestone for the group, least of all because of one key contributor, but in other ways it just may be their most confusing outing yet. Aoxomoxoa is brave to step out into the world of experimentation, but unfortunately more than a few of those experiments end up falling kind of flat, and the resulting album is one where the Dead are tragically confined to their own adventuring, and the ultimate result is a work that's a step down from Anthem of the Sun in quite a few ways.

    Perhaps the one way that Aoxomoxoa does improve on its predecessor, though, is in the writing. This is in large part to the band finding themselves a new lyricist in Robert Hunter, whose partnership with Jerry Garcia takes up the entirety of this album; only album opener "St. Stephen" features another writer in Phil Lesh. In time, the partnership with Robert Hunter will prove invaluable, and his strange, psychedelic lyrics rooted in the American tradition are a defining aspect of the Dead's music. On this album alone, Hunter helps to give us both "St. Stephen" and "China Cat Sunflower", both of which remained beloved staples of Dead shows throughout their history, and the latter remains one of their absolute most-played songs ever. It's immediately obvious from those two alone that Hunter's impact is crucial, and it only helps that he has plenty of fantastic songs throughout that also bare his name, from expansive psychedelic country of the closing track "Cosmic Charlie" to the almost acoustic psyche-folk of "Rosemary" to the jaunty "Dupree's Diamond Blues" that signals the near future for the Grateful Dead. It's in these areas where the Dead themselves are just as capable as musicians, although it's Jerry Garcia who carries most of the weight on this album—really, it's far closer to a Garcia solo project than a Dead album given that he sings and writes every song. That's not necessarily a bad thing, especially since so much of the album is as solid as it is, but it's still worth noting. That isn't to say the band doesn't bring the energy throughout, though, and much of the Dead's third album lays close to the psychedelia they've established before, even as they find themselves venturing into strange lands.

    It's this adventuring spirit that is both the album's greatest strength and also its critical weakness. Much of the album's middle point, save for "China Cat Sunflower" and "Rosemary", flounders under its own ambition and experimentation, which more often than not leads to failures. "Mountains of the Moon" is some strange piece of baroque psychedelia which sounds like The Zombies gone horribly wrong, and there's little that the Dead can do about it to help make this affair better. Equally egregious, although not nearly as daring, is the merely mediocre "Doin' That Rag". It isn't necessarily terrible, but it's immediately in and out of conscious memory. The worst offender on this album, however, has the audacity to take up a third of the second half, and that's the 8-minute slog that is "What's Become of the Baby", a sort of sonic experiment that is entirely just Jerry Garcia "singing" with some trippy vocal effects. Really far out, eh? I'd give it bonus points for weirdness, but given that Tim Buckley's "Starsailor" came out a little more than a year later as is essentially the same thing but far more experimental and interesting, I must say that these bonus points are light—that and "Starsailor" wasn't eight fucking minutes. Garcia's studio toying is a complete failure, and it will not surprise you that the song holds a distinguished honor of never being performed by the group live, unless you count them playing the song over PA as playing the song live, and I don't. Fantastic work. We should all be very thankful that we have "Cosmic Charlie" immediately after to effectively serve as an Altoid mint to wash out the aftertaste of "What's Become of the Baby"—clearly, some sense had returned to the group.

    Aoxomoxoa is an ambitious undertaking for a group whose main art was the live show, and it shows the Dead undergoing a level of studio experimentation and risk-taking that sets it apart in their catalog. That being said, the album also shows the faults of containing the Dead to the studio—even some of the sharpest moments on this album feel too contained, not being allowed to bloom and soar the way the best Dead material does. By the end of the decade, the world would hear what a truly untethered Grateful Dead sounded like, and they wouldn't even have to leave their homes for it. At this point, though, Aoxomoxoa is almost certainly a step down from their previous album, and I'd argue that Anthem's experimentation is just as daring and even more successful than this album. Still, given the many great songs and concert staples that Aoxomoxoa blessed us with, it's still easy to find the value in this record. It was the first stop on what would prove to be an exceptionally important year for the Dead; the next album, however, would cement their legacy.

RATING: ✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯

Listen to Aoxomoxoa.