A Tropical Sonic Delight, Tipping their Hats to a Grateful Dead Classic

 

Lucid Phase, today, announced their upcoming cover of Grateful Dead’s Althea. The band’s reimagined tropical rendition of the song is set for release on Friday September 1^st,
2023 by the Los Angeles based band. The seven minute and seven second
track explores a new version of the original while staying true to some
of the key motifs of The Grateful Dead.
 

“I never knew a Dead cover was in our future.”  explains lead
singer, Garret Laver. ‘Cyrus (lead guitar) played the main riff over and
over again on a quiet New Year’s Day when the idea struck.’ Laver
continues, “Once hearing the native sounds that we create in Lucid
Phase, combined with the legendary lyrics and instrumentation of Althea,
there was an instant excitement to cover it.”


Lucid Phase is comprised of members; Garret Laver, Cyrus Maleki, and
Jacob Flack. Their sound blends roots, dub & blues, with influences
across the globe featuring guitar, bass, keys, percussion, melodica,
trombone, saxophone, violin, and at times personally recorded bits from
exotic locations such as the jungles of Costa Rica.


Band member, Cyrus Maleki, explains “The Grateful Dead has always been a
huge influence through my musical journey picking up certain Jerry
(Garcia) techniques when playing the guitar. Though jam bands aren’t our
only influences, I think there is something there to riff on how deep a
band like the Dead are willing to go exploring a sound where we deep
dive ourselves into something like getting just the right ‘wha’ tone out
of my guitar.” He continues, “We’ve enjoyed a ton of shows together
watching a lot of the Grateful Dead band reincarnations over the years
from Furthur to Dead & Company and Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros, and so on. It’s a great sound and even better community.”


Garret explains more about the Althea cover, “With a slower
tempo than the original song’s recording, we aimed to achieve a
transcendent musical journey that the Dead explored when they played it.
We hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed creating it.”


Band member, Jacob Flack, speaks to the recording studio sessions
mentioning “We really wanted to capture the 1980 studio version of Althea by
exploring Garret’s vocals matching the original timing and cadences
while brining original personality to the track. Cyrus integrated plenty
of Jerry’s signature guitar riffs blended with his own guitar style in
his solos and layered a nice guitar skank track on top.” Jacob explains
further, “We brought in our friend and previous collaborator, Jordan
‘Jordy’ Starke to track drums for the song and then topped it all off
with harmonies, reggae bubble, guitar skanks/slurs, and some signature
percussion elements – One being the güiro which you can hear in the
original song.”

   (Jordan “Jordy” Starke – Drummer)