Grateful Dead - From the Mars Hotel: The Angel's Share (2024) [Hi-Res]

With Rhino's surprise release of From The Mars Hotel: The Angel's Share, the Grateful Dead vaults have once again been opened. Featuring 16 newly unearthed session recordings, the digital collection brings listeners directly into San Francisco's Coast Recorders during the spring of 1974, revealing the band's real-time process as they crafted such eternal staples as "Scarlet Begonias," "Ship Of Fools," "China Doll," "U.S. Blues," "Unbroken Chain" and more that would make up their classic From The Mars Hotel LP.

The evolution of all of those songs and other album highlights is charted throughout this fourth edition of the band's fan-favorite Angel's Share series. Like previous installments that accompanied milestone reissues of Workingman's Dead, American Beauty and Wake Of The Flood, From The Mars Hotel: The Angel's Share brings together hours of expertly-curated outtakes, alternate versions, acoustic mixes, ​​unexpected moments and revelations that have never been heard or available on DSPs until now.

As these Angel's Share recordings further showcase, the Grateful Dead were cooking with gas in the run-up to From The Mars Hotel. The band had successfully emerged from a series of hectic, harrowing times, and would soon follow their transformative Wake Of The Flood with this second self-released album from their very own Grateful Dead Records. During the mere eight months that had passed between the two beloved LPs, the group also played some of their most exploratory live music and largest venues to date, famously amplified by the homemade, 75-ton Wall of Sound that they debuted on March 23rd, 1974. While several of the album's formative songs would first be introduced into setlists along that season's tour, the Grateful Dead spent two months recording and honing them in the studio for the album.