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The Grateful Dead
Here they are, only one studio album into their career, and for their second album, the Grateful Dead decide to dive headfirst into a sea of weirdness that is almost unfathomable.
To anybody who listens to music in a linear fashion, this album is just too difficult to comprehend, or appreciate. Instead of compiling an album by arranging songs side by side, Anthem of the Sun is one gigantic collage of sound, weaving elements of studio recordings in and out, around live takes and then over and under random noise and processed sounds. For a casual listener, it’s a mess. For a person in the throes of a hallucinogenic experience (which was admittedly their intended audience) it was a catalyst to another world.
Anthem of the Sun can only be said to ‘work’ if the listener takes a semi-active role. It is by no means necessary to take acid to follow along on this trip (although God knows that would probably help), but it does take some patience and an open mind. There is little melody here to hum, and few musical passages that invite you to tap along. Lyrical ideas are opaque as well, leaving the listener to create the proper frame of mind to let such weirdness unfold on its own terms. In one spot, guitars reel about over a sea of percussion, only to dissolve into a chorus of kazoos. Elsewhere, a song fragment drifts in and out of the mix, as a live version of the same fragment competes for attention. Somewhere else, a live, bluesy jam featuring Pigpen suddenly vanishes underneath a song segment that runs by at three or four times its natural speed. If you can relax and hear Anthem of the Sun as a hippie-fied action painting done with sound and faders, then you’ll do just fine and you’ll probably appreciate what you hear. Casual listeners should be forewarned, though, that unless they can adapt their way of thinking, they might find themselves frustrated that there is hardly a single cohesive idea anywhere on the entire record.
Grade: 
 
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