Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros - Live in Colorado, Vol. 2 (2022) [44.1kHz/24bit]

[antonsm]

Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros - Live in Colorado, Vol. 2 (2022) 44.1-24
Country: USA
Genre: Rock,Blues
Format: FLAC (*tracks)
Quality: Lossless [44,1kHz/24 bit]
Time: 01:15:43
Full Size: 862 MB

How fast should a Grateful Dead song be played? There is perhaps no question that has occupied Deadheads' time and consumed more emotion over the last 20 or so years, ever since bassist Phil Lesh and guitarist Bob Weir reunited the band after Jerry Garcia's 1995 death. The tempo wars have claimed several versions of the post-Garcia Dead, and if the question seems banal, it nevertheless conceals irreconcilable philosophical differences. For Lesh, these songs are meant to pump with energy, swirling up the audience in a psychedelic dervish. For Weir, they should be played slowly, with purpose and focus, "an audio playlet that needed to sink into the audience's mind," as writer Joel Selvin puts it. The music of the Grateful Dead, in Weir's formulation, is bigger, vaster, and contains sweeping views; why speed through it?

On Weir's second official release with his Wolf Bros project, Live in Colorado, Vol. 2, he stages some of the most beloved material in the Grateful Dead's catalog with the passion and reverence of a couple spending their 50th anniversary looking back on their wedding day. It's a striking set, one that does justice to Weir's vision without ever succumbing to the sense of drag that can occasionally topple Dead & Company, the stadium-touring band he fronts with John Mayer. As is typically the case with Weir's solo work, there is no lead guitarist, and thus no attempt to dig around in the DNA of these songs to discover what else they might contain. Leaning instead on bassist Don Was, keyboardist Jeff Chimenti, and especially drummer Jay Lane, Weir's arrangements expand these songs outward, their scope and sense of majesty evoked by the horns, strings, and pedal steel of the accompanying Wolfpack ensemble. There's never a question as to where we might be going, only an offhanded awe at how stately this music turns out to be.

Much of the album's grace is owing to the pleasant contrast between Weir's late style as a rhythm guitarist and the slickness of the band. His instrument is constantly buzzing, and he doesn't strum it so much as brush at it in a way that makes it sound like a live wire being batted with a feather. He can be halting, sometimes a touch behind the beat, frequently rough as he roots around the edges of the songs in search of new rhythmic pathways. It's a winningly hardheaded mode of playing, one that comes from having abandoned the concept of perfection or completion decades ago, and the romantic swirl of the band mimics the emotion of his playing if not the tone. It's strangely comforting to hear them polish Merle Haggard's "Mama Tried" as if Weir's blocky soloing is a totally normal way for a guitar to sound in a country song.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClCwkSJRABE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYusCg3KP9U

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