Every critic alive gracefully smiles at this record, dismissing it with the statement 'this is yet another attempt to put that famous live Dead sound on record', but I tell ya: either no critics really listened to this record, or, well, the live Dead pretty much sucked around 1969. The record isn't horrendous at all, nope, parts of it are even enjoyable (other parts are dreadful, though). But there's not a single trace of an instrumental jam on this record, the thing that the Dead were most famous for, after all, and some songs do not differ very much in mood from the assumingly 'classic' American Beauty. The funny thing is that, while all the band members are really good at their instruments, especially Jerry Garcia on guitar and Tom Constanten on keyboards, they almost never really know what to do with them. True, this time around the band had obviously decided to try their hand at something more 'conventional', drawing on all kinds of rootsy and folkish inspirations to help them in the process, but they were still too stoned to make anything decent. Indeed, I've rarely seen such a sloppy, uninspired, draggy bunch of songs all collected together on one record. The basic impression is that most of them are based on some rudimentary folk melody or other, which the band members effectively try to profanate by diluting it with rather bland instrumentation and a loose, almost 'stoned' style of playing. Even worse, some tracks are offensively spoiled by dated gimmicks, like electronic voice encoding ('Rosemary').
But never mind the spicing up: it's the heart of the tree that's rotten. When you finally take as much listens as you need to get to the musical essence of the songs, you'll see that it's usually plain banal. The opening tune, 'St Stephen', for instance, is built on a perfectly simple fast folk melody - it's just that the song is so stoned out that you don't notice it for a while. The ballads are totally uninspired and uninspiring, and no matter how convincingly Lesh or Garcia try to pull them off, it just doesn't work for me: I'm not aware of who actually gets the lead vocals on 'Mountains Of The Moon', but it doesn't matter - the song is plain dull, and the pretty harpsichord does nothing to save it in the long run. As for 'Rosemary', it's all plain atmosphere: slow, noodling acoustic guitar with those dreadful encoded vocals, thankfully lasting not more than two minutes.
The good news here is a couple of spooky country-western send-ups, complete with Robert Hunter lyrics that deal with the usual country-western topics (personal problems with the juridicial branch of power in 'Dupree's Diamond Blues', personal problems with maturing in 'Doin' That Rag'), but dress them up in pretentious and not very entertaining imagery. However, nobody listens to the Dead for the lyrics: I'm able to enjoy the former song because it has the closest thing to a solid melody on the album (one has only to close one's eyes to the fact that it's a generic country-western pattern), and able to enjoy the latter one because the chorus features a fast, nice, inviting, and at the same time somewhat ominous riff (Garcia's trademark style, eh? or is it Bob Weir? I'm not sure of their separate functions on the albums) that nicely intertwines with the organs. I'd say that the song presages the very similar (in mood, not in melody) 'Friend Of The Devil' on Beauty, but of course, this one is overlong and overall, still boring, at least when it comes to the regular verses.
Apart from these two acceptable numbers and some tasteful slide work on 'Cosmic Charlie' that more or less works as the album closer (it could have been shorter by a couple of minutes too, though), however, there's no real good news about the record. 'China Cat Sunflower', the best known song off the album, is plain stupid - a typical example of how crazy and pointless hippie music could be when it wanted to. Some say that it was a great live number, but I can't judge by the version on here. It's completely chaotic, with several guitars going in completely different directions and a complicated drum pattern that goes in a third one, while the 'nah-nah-nah' hippie backing vocals try to simulate a 'nice' vibe throughout. And, of course, the truly low point of the album, for which I refuse to even give it an overall rating of nine (these guys need to be punished), is a horrendous, eight-and-a-half minute long mantra ('What's Become Of The Baby?') that has no instrumental playing at all - just a lot of echoey, almost dissonant chanting that makes your ears burst and your patience explode. Whereas the liner notes call the song 'eerie', I just say that the 'song' is ridiculously bad and could have been recorded by just anybody. Typical hippie excess, you'll say? Well, might as well be - but that's just yet another sign of the record having dated badly.
Whatever. I mean, the main problem is very easy to see - the band's members were (still are, I guess, at least, the ones that are still alive) very unskilful songwriters. And what happens when a very unskilful (but very stoned) songwriter takes a handful of moderately decent folk/country melodies and performs them as if he were playing a Jefferson Airplane song? You're right - shit happens. Later on (actually, on the next album) they'd correct this mistake, outgrow this transitional phase and throw the 'psychedelic' elements out of their folkish rip-offs, but that would be later on. For the moment, forget about buying this album. Isn't it strange that a band that's always quoted as one of the main psychedelic ensembles and hippie gurus of the Sixties didn't really hit its stride until the Seventies? Well - like I said, shit happens...

(by George Starostin, Only Solitaire)